On 1/4/2016 3:40 AM, Gene Heskett wrote: > You said headstock gears? Backgears for spindle speed changing? 5/16" > wide for a lathe swinging a 13" chuck? In a job shop, that sounds lime > a recipe to keep LeBlond busy making replacements. That almost sounds > like a job for a new motor & inverter drive, if a 5HP version can be > sourced. Or did you investigate that, finding it would be even more > sheckles by the time that gearbox was stripped and bypassed to make it > strong enough?
Yup. Gears in the headstock only 5/16" thick, except for the final drive to the spindle for high and low range. *Those* helical gears are nigh indestructible. The set screw for the high speed gear on the spindle was loose, allowing it to slide to the left and chew up the fancy nuts on the right end of the two shafts in the gearbox output drive. Luckily the OD of that gear cleared the diameter of the shafts enough to leave the remains of those nuts as thin threaded sleeves. LeBlond made the standard/heavy Regal line and the lighter weight "trainer" line in the "Roundhead" style. For most of their lathes in the WW2 and earlier years they'd design one, then scale it down to make a smaller lathe, then scale that one down for a yet smaller model. Thus each size of every model of LeBlond before they went to the square cornered designs is nearly 100% parts unique to that model/size. It's things like this I discovered *after* buying a 17x72" WW2 trainer with missing parts. I lucked out, found a guy trying to sell a shorter 17" trainer on eBay with a completely shot bed. Took a while to convince him the only way he'd ever shift it was to part it out, and give me dibs on the pieces I needed. ;) I got it going and sold it to a guy looking for a lathe just like it to work on Caterpillar axles. The 17" trainer got downsized for the 15" and the 15" to the 13". A 13" LeBlond Regal roundhead trainer needs a delicate hand at the controls and absolutely *never* so much as think about touching any lever on the headstock until the lathe is brought to a complete stop. There's so much empty space inside the headstock, and the gears have to shift a long ways... if LeBlond had given things half a thought I bet they could easily have fit it with 1/2" or thicker gears. 'Course there was wartime steel rationing and costs. Making as many lathes as possible from the metal LeBlond was allotted, and getting them to schools to train machinists likely had a hand in this model having such thin gears. I'm only the 3rd owner of this lathe made in 1934. First was the Idaho State University in Pocatello. I bought it from a guy who used (and likely abused) this lathe as an ISU student in the 70's. Judging from the tool marks and poor treatment obvious inside the headstock, it's a fair bet the reverse gears had been torn up a few times. And of course they're 14 pitch and the entire worldwide gear industry decided shortly after WW2 that nobody was going to use 14 pitch again, ever. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
