- Joined
- Jan 22, 2012
- Messages
- 655
The stock belt takes a set on the pulleys, you can feel it catch in one spot, this can cause vibration on the machine. Also you may want to try different belt tension, I run mine a little on the looser side. I had better results with Gates Tri-Power notched belt (BX24 and BX25), link belts also seem to work well by many others. The pulleys seem to run very even on my machine, but might check the belt alignment.
I have been using a Napa belt, part number from zmotorsports write up. During my tests I have tried both tight and slightly looser with slightly loose giving better results. I had to swap the motor as my lathe started out as a single phase unit so alignment was part of the install. The pulleys visually look good when running so if they are off it won't be much.
I can feel the oscillation when touching the controls but when Matt at PM asked for a video I came up with this method for showing the vibration on the video. I used a cup of WD40 placed on the headstock, you can clearly see when the lathe starts to oscillate by the waves to the fluid. During testing I discovered that the vibration resonated at certain motor speeds, very close to the standard 60hz position. You can see in the video that the vibration peaks at 62hz and is gone at 59 and 64hz and also occurs in different gear settings at the same 62hz. In conversations with Jim Dawson, he pointed out the since the vibration wasn't dependent on spindle speed but did occur at certain motor speeds the problem wasn't in the spindle or chuck but was in the motor, belt, pulleys or input shaft/gears. I am hoping it's either the belt or one of the pulleys as that is much easier to correct.
This particular video was done using the 3 jaw chuck from my Enco 12x36 lathe, at the time we were trying to determine if the PM chuck was the problem.