# My new (really, new) Logan Model 820



## Wolfram Malukker (Nov 17, 2018)

I think this thing's been used twice. I bought it out of a home sale where it was not known that it was there-the old man's wood shop was full of tools but no one noticed the lathe, because it was completely buried under a pile of wood chips and sawdust. When the family went to shovel out the dust...CLANG! It's complete, and has all the available features of a model 820. It will make a fine replacement for my Atlas 12x36, which needs more love than I can give to be put into "very good" condition. The logan is almost there. The paint has all started to peel and lift, from being stored in oily wood chips, so I am currently stripping the old paint and re-painting with good machine paint. Up until today, at 3:30PM, I worked for a local machine shop as a process engineer...but today, I was made redundant and let go.

One thing-it came with what I believe is an original logan taper attachment, but I am not sure. I'll take photos of it tomorrow, this one clamps on to the rear flat way, instead of bolting to the lathe bed like others I am familiar with. 

Since I'll have plenty of spare time for a while, I plan to go ahead and finish the repaint and re-assembly during the between-jobs time. Maybe I'll do some turning or pour a few castings to make some money on the side, but more than likely, I'll just finish the minor restoration, convert to a VFD, and fit a boring table so I can fix my home built shaper. (I built the shaper in high school using the Gingery methods, but I was too financially strapped to buy the book. I built it from the pictures I could find on the internet.) The shaper is missing a few key details that I didn't get at the time, but among the most important is that the down slide does not sit flat against the ram face. I may have to do some significant rework there to get it straight.


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## Martin W (Nov 17, 2018)

Looking forward to pics of the restoration. Sorry about your job. 
I would love to see your shaper.
Cheers
Martin


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## HarryJM (Nov 17, 2018)

Great find! 

I found a 820 on CL's last week and getting ready to put it back together (completely disassembled to move it) today. http://www.lathe.com/ser-no.htm is a list of Logan serial numbers and year made associated with those numbers.

Best of luck on your job search.


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## CluelessNewB (Nov 17, 2018)

Pictures please!


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## Wolfram Malukker (Nov 19, 2018)

Worked on it more this weekend, and cleaned up the bed enough to see the serial number-this thing was PACKED in sawdust. Mine is a 1946 build date, serial 37728.

Coupla nice things from Andy Lofquist showed up today, the A-11 Cross slide/Boring table and the the Angle Plate. It's been a while, but I still remember how to do an angle plate solely on the lathe.


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## Wolfram Malukker (Nov 25, 2018)

Alright, photo time. Let's see if we can ID some bits and pieces here:

Loading it up in the back of the truck:


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## Wolfram Malukker (Nov 25, 2018)

Alright, photo time. Let's see if we can ID some bits and pieces here:

Loading it up in the back of the truck:











Once home, all the parts were counted and the books were put away.











Mixed up a bit of a modified alkyd enamel, I think I got pretty close to the only parts that have the original paint left:






Now that I've got the paint matched fairly well, I started stripping off the 1970's shag-carpet-green, some red smears, and a LOT of chipped and blistered blue-black. 











Citristrip seems to work just fine removing the old leaded paint, without causing dust. A scrub down with some hot TSP and they'll be ready to repaint. 

Here's some photos of the taper attachment that I am having a hard time identifying. It appears to be the part delivered with the 1920 11" lathe, looking at photos. It works just fine with this 820, though.


























The gib strip is missing out of the slide block, I'll have to make another one. Also the stud in the slide block is gone, it the bolt that is currently there needs a stack of washers to position the cross-slide bracket correctly without binding. 

This lathe will get a 3-phase motor conversion and VFD, and may eventually become a cabinet model. The original motor that was fitted was 3-phase, but the motor I've got here that came with it is a 220v reversible, with a Furnas branded drum switch. It wasn't the original fitment, it was bolted to a wooden block and the block bolted to the motor bracket.

I'll have more photos as I get more work done.


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## Wolfram Malukker (Nov 27, 2018)

Picked up a motor for this today, was wandering through the scrapyard and found a Baldor inverter-duty 1HP/3ph on top of the bin that didn't look like it had been there long. Turned the pulley, and the bearings were pretty rough, so I knew why it was out of service. Took it down the street to the rewinder and had it hi-pot tested, it passed at 3000V and showed zero inter-winding issues. He had the bearings on the shelf, so 19$ later, I have a good motor and a pair of new bearings to suit, just gotta scrub it down, hit it with some glyptal, and change the bearings on the armature.

It will work well with the Automation Direct GS1 drive I picked up out of a control cabinet in the same scrapyard a few weeks ago. There were four in the cabinet, out of the four three were still good and the fourth was pretty crispy. I am keeping my eyes open for a good control cabinet, I've got a small one that will work but it will be tight.


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## Nogoingback (Nov 29, 2018)

Congrats on the new lathe.  It looks like it'll clean up nicely.


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## tmenyc (Nov 29, 2018)

I'm another newbie 820 owner, so am enjoying this as well.  And, I appreciate your far deeper knowledge of how these things work...but I'm learning!
Tim


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## Wolfram Malukker (Nov 30, 2018)

While waiting on the painting to move forward (recoat windows are a pain, sometimes...) I have been borrowing a mill to complete the A-11 Cross Slide casting from Metal Lathe Accessories to fit the Logan.

Because the mill is borrowed, and is not well fitted out, and there are strict rules in place about removing the mill vise (a cheap Shars that has not been fettled...) some of the photos are going to show suboptimal setups...but this is what I have to work with.







First things first-a piece of card stock against the rear jaw, after dialing in the rear jaw of the vice, and an old diesel wrist pin for a cylinder jaw, and now I can setup and face off the "lead" side of the casting-this is the face that will be used as the square reference for all operations. You can see the cored-in T-slots...I would almost have preferred they weren't cored in this particular casting, as cores were close but just not quite square-this caused issues later.

The face mill in the photos here is a cheap chinese copy of a Techniks face mill, and did surprisingly good for the 32$ for the cutterhead, the arbor, and the four mitsubishi-reject inserts that were shipped with it. I say reject because they look identical to the Mitsubishi APMT1608PDER-VP15F inserts that I used to use at work-identical markings-but they had tiny, tiny chips in the edges of the coating. Not in the actual carbide, but just the coating, and I'd never have seen it if I hadn't be suspicious of them to start with and gotten out the microscope. The APMT inserts are widely toleranced, so I had to play with the position in the cutter to get them all cutting in a balanced fashion, but after measuring the insert pockets and then the inserts, it's just that two inserts were 0.0008" longer than the other two. Another mark pointing to these cheap chinese import inserts being factory "seconds" or rejects-but they worked very nicely and after tramming out the mill, left an excellent finish on the cast iron.






After the lead side was cut, the casting was set up on the same cylinder square underneath, and the lead side was set against the rear jaw of the vise. After the vise was carefully tightened and checked and re-tightened and checked a few more times, the top of the casting was faced off to clean a casting flaw (bit of sand fell in the mold and left a pit) and then faced flat and square to the lead side. I'm still at 1.160" thick after the final "finish" cut and the drawing calls for 1" thickness. A little thicker is fine, I think-and the T-slot nuts I bought are so tall that I can't go any thinner without re-cutting all the T-nuts. They aren't particularly well made anyway...I may just have to make some better ones. I was hoping to just buy them and use the same T-slot cutter for all the slots on this machine...but the T-slot cutter didn't last.

It's a Shars Tool T-slot cutter, high-speed steel and was 20 bucks. I didn't expect the world, but I didn't want to pony up for a carbide tipped cutter because T-slot cutters have a hard life-they don't ever last too long. On first T-slot, which was slotted with a 3/8" two flute, then followed through with the T-slot cutter, it did very nicely-good chip ejection, nice sharp clean corners. The second slot is where the problems started. Due to the T-slot cores having shifted a bit, they weren't particularly square to the long axis of the part. The first core was good, but as I went down the part they got further and further from square. This meant the t-slot cutter was having to work harder on one side of the slot than the other, and I had to really slow down on the feed rate to stop the chatter and vibration. Slowing down, and the T-slot cutter only barely cleaning up the bottom of the cored T-slot, meant that the very hard skin of an iron casting was all that was being cut on the bottom of the slot-and it started eating the corners off the lower three flutes. The slow feed rate excaberated the issue, by allowing a lot of the chips to be re-cut by the lower flutes...this wore them down even faster. In the end, all the slots were cut, but the T-slot cutter is done. The bottom flutes would need to be reground, even though the top flutes (which were cutting in clean iron most of the time and the chips fell away from them) are in perfectly fine condition. The cutter could be re-ground into a woodruff key cutter if I can't think of another use for it.

On other fronts, the motor acquired the other day has been cleaned, both bearings replaced, and the windings washed, baked out, re-varnished, and baked again, even though it tested good for shorts/ground faults and hi-pot prior to the rebuild. Good practice is only good as long as it's followed, and I don't want trouble from the motor-even if I did only spend 25$ on it. (Between the cost of the motor, the bearings, and the glyptal)


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