- Joined
- Oct 16, 2016
- Messages
- 10
Yes, and that was part of the problem! Everything I read and all the videos I watched suggested, if not outright showed, that the gears should be easy to remove, whereas mine - especially the metal ones - weren't coming off without a fight.
Now that I've swapped out several of the gears a few times they are taking much less force to get on/off their shafts, to the point that I can change out the plastic gears by hand; the metal gears still need to go into the press, I just don't need to crank down on the handle so hard. More specifically, it appears that the shaft bore on the metal gears, at least, is a little bit undersized and the keys are a little too tall (or the keyways are too shallow). Once I have some spares on hand I might try reaming the metal gears with an 8mm spiral flute reamer and grinding a few thou off the keys (once I figure out how to securely hold onto the durn things against either the bench grinder or the belt sander).
Yes, you read correctly, and yes, it does appear that the gears are an unusually tight fit on my machine (in contrast to the unusually sloppy fit of the compound slide, but that is a subject for another thread). It will be interesting to see if any other new 7x lathe owners experience the same issue or if mine was just a one-off.