Craftsman Commercial 12" Rebuild

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Nitmare67

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Hi everyone I'm new here but I've gained alot of knowledge reading nonstop. I'm rebuilding my first lathe. Its a Craftsman commercial 12" with the matching cabinet and under drive, quick change gear box. It was all given to me by a friend of mine that owns a machine shop. It sat for 15 years in his garage after he trained his son on it. I'm an electrical engineer by day and aspiring machinist by night haha. I will try to post up some pics soon. So far I have diassembled and derusted everything and began painting. Replaced the Timken spindle bearings with new C3 fit Timkens. For motor controls I'm using an Allen-Bradley Plus 40 Vector drive... 115vac input and 240 3 phase out to a 1hp Allen-Bradley vector drive specific motor...... honestly its a 1500 dollar motor and vfd package in a 500 dollar lathe but I get all of the parts free though my work because we have so much in our surplus from shutting down old plants and upgrading machines. I was able to get a brand new 1hp motor and appropriate 1.5hp VFD.

I'm in the process of restoring everything right now including paint because it was all in bad shape. Im finishing up painting everything so far which as came out very nice.

A few things I would like to find.

Does anyone make brass gibs for these machines?

What about tumbler gear upgrades? The forward tumbler gear is worn and I would like to purchase some steel gears instead of the alloy OEM ones.


Thanks guys
 
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Will check that out. I have been looking at Boston gears on Motion industries for gears I could modify to make fit. You're probably right with them being louder I just thought if I'm going to buy new ones why not buy better. Maybe a good set of oem ones would do the trick. I will call Clausing later today but I doubt there open until next year.

Thank for the help man!
 
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I haven't that I can recall seen any newly made gibs offered for the Atlas. Which is actually quite surprising. Maybe someone else has. I agree that the plastic ones were a cost savings mistake on Clausing's part. But the best material to make new ones from would be steel, not brass. The carriage gib should still be steel. Until sometime in the late 60's, so were the ones for the cross and compound slides. The parts are the same size as in the 10" and early 12". The coefficients of both static and dynamic friction of steel on steel are lower than brass on steel. And note that the compound gib is the same as the cross slide gib except a little shorter. In the later parts lists, the part number for both are shown as being the same. I have always assumed that during assembly on the production line, they assembled the compound slide and then just cut off the excess.
 
Hi Nitmare67,

Welcome to the site. It sounds like you will fit right in here.

It also sounds like you have what most here would consider a dream job with access to a pile of used parts.
Lucky you! :encourage:

-brino

Edit: BTW, got any pictures of your before/rebuild/after?
 
Nitmare67 said:
I'm an electrical engineer by day and aspiring machinist by night haha.
Click to expand...

That pretty much describes me 30 to 40 years ago. Only back in those days, you didn't often find bargains on decent US made machine tools as the Chinese takeover was just beginning. I had to pool my "Christmas Ataboys" for about four years until I was able to buy a new 3996. ;)
 
I love this site already haha. I love vintage anything. My main passion for my entire life has been racing cars. Drag racing and circle track racing... 1/2mile oval stock cars and such. All I play with anymore though is drag cars and very fast street cars. Having my own mill and lathe is a HUGE help is doing what I love to do.... and i also enjoy making stuff so its a win win. My current two toys are my 67 Mustang and my 99 Mustang GT. The 67 was my first car i bought it back in 98 for 5k dollars and it was in pretty nice shape. Since then I completely restored and modified it... Now its a 600hp pro street type car. Has a 418 cubic inch small block ford stroker in it, big CNC aluminum heads, solid roller cam, 11:1 compresion with a built C4 and a big stall converter. Runs 10.50s on motor and runs on pump gas.

My 99 GT is a 35 anniversary car. This car actualy makes more hp than the 67 and is faster but much more streetable. It has a 4.6l ford 2 valve modular engine it. Thats the engine that all 99-04s came with. Forged crank, rods pistons. Trick flow aluminum heads, custom cams that I designed and a Kenne Bell twin screw supercharger making 20lbs of boost. Also running a methanol injection system which sprays up 18 gallons per hour of pure meth when under boost via the progressive conroller. Current format its making 660 HP to the wheels... so about 720 off the flywheels. Totally streetable. We drove it cross country to a Mustang show last year.

The mill and lathe is a new hobby to support a current hobby lol
 
As far as gibs - the gibs in my lathe were steel in the cross slide and compound but it looks like somebody tried to make a new plastic one for the saddle. Maybe I will just find another steel one for the saddle. My hopes are to make my own once my lathe is running with the mill attachment.
 
Welcome aboard!

I too have a 12x36 Craftsman Commercial, complete with under drive cabinet, all waiting for me to rebuild it. I purchased it as a pile of parts several years ago. Someone else started to rebuild it but didn't get much farther along than breaking it down into sub-assemblies. A year later I moved and it came with me, now five more years gone by and it is still in parts on shelves.

The lathe I am using is circa 1935 Craftsman 12x24. I replaced the tumbler gears with steel gears procured from Boston Gear. I had to do some machining to get them to fit, but that was easy. They certainly were a lot noisier to start but have quieted substantially with only a few months of occasional use. Lubricating them with "Open Gear Grease" helps to reduce the noise level too, especially when new. They seem to get plenty of spindle oil overflow from the Babbitt bearing on the small end of the spindle and most of the grease has long since been washed off, and the noise is no longer objectionable.

You can replace the carriage gib easily enough with a length of precision ground flat bar. Speedymetals.com has this in stock. Purchase by thickness and width, cut it to length then drill some divots for the adjusting screws and file off any burrs from cutting and drilling. Cross slide and tool post slide gibs will need to be beveled and ground. Any machinist who has a surface grinder should be able to do that. The tailstock gib is precision ground square stock and should not need to be replaced.

Keep us posted! Remember that we all like photographs!

Spiral_Chips
 
Thanks again for the info.

And luckily my cross slide and compound gibs look good. I'm going to hand scrape them in once I have things close to ready to go.
 
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