Enterprise 1550 lathe restore

Hey Chipper, thanks for clarifying that for me. Ungortunately everything is rusted up, I couldn't get the squares drives to budge yet. I'll keep spraying em with penetrating oil. Everything has been a fight, but I'm slowly getting one rusted part free at a time, lol.

Thanks for the vfd tip, dabbler. I got a 7.5kw vfd, for my 3.7kw motor. So I think I should be OK.
 
Penetrating oil is wonderful stuff - keep soaking it down from time to time.

When cranking on the cams, be sure to use a square drive that fits reason well (an easy way to break - split - the cams is by gronking on them with a square drive that is too small - forcing the square open).

It is possible that some previous owner of your machine has cranked on the cams and they have been wound around the wrong direction (try a bit moving it both ways). Do you know anybody else that has a lathe with a D1 type spindle (whatever size) and just check out how they work? Once you know how they work, it will make more sense in sorting it out.
 
Well, I need a better square drive to fit the cams. The one I got with it is sloppy and it started twisting the square drive on the tool. It looks like 10mm best I can fit my caliper in there. So if I Mic off the chuck body I only have 0.001 runout. Best I can measure (since the chuck is rusty the needle is kinda shaky going around.) But I tried tapping the high side of my test rod ( which is just some 1-1/2" shaft I had) as I tighten the chuck down and worked it around and got it within .0005. 3-1/2" in front the jaws. I took a cut off the end of the rod, maybe .030 and the tolerance measured the same. Within .0005. So I think that's good. What should I be shooting for, or what's a good tolerance how far out the chuck?
 
At the front face of the jaws on a ground rod, you'd be lucky to get .002 or .003 on most new chucks. 6" away from the jaws, .010 is common.

Very high quality chucks achieve only .002 across the entire scroll (we are talking north of 2K$ here), despite the claims in the literature. Chucks are becoming like vacuum cleaners, they plug into a normal socket, but have 3 and 4 'air horsepower' (of course not a real thing)

Your lathe certainly seems great for a restoration.n

My mistake about the pins versus cams thing, I just helped a guy where he had them backward, and somehow it rubbed off!

Getting the right sized key is a great first step.

Using rust reducing cleaners can help as well. Some penetrating oils have an acid or chelating agent in them to change the O3 oxides to theO1 oxides, which have a much smaller grain size, and that helps a lot. Use elevated heat to help the penetrant to seep in (viscosity is affected by heat) - even bring the chuck fro 70 degrees F to 100 degrees F makes a big difference. Sometimes the change in temperature is helpful in breaking the bond on its own.
 
Probably a number of opinions on how good is good enough (depends on what equipment one has and what their objectives are). My view is that a runout of 0.002” on a 3J is pretty good. As you get further out from the chuck, any short coming in the piece of bar will play a bigger role (no piece of bar is perfect). There has to be some play in the chuck scroll to the chuck body (so the scroll can turn) - which is why you can tap in a part on a 3J for a little better run out.

On mine machine, the key (which is the factory original) is 0.371” square and the hole is about 0.386”.

These do not seem to be hard fast numbers. My other D1-4 machine uses a key that is 0.385” square and the hole is about 0.402” square. Regardless a key that fits well is desirable (since I mostly buy old machines, the various keys are often gone - I have probably made a dozen to 15 keys of various sizes/designs).
 
Now I'm thinking about it I probably just trued the end of the rod where i measured it? The rod directly off the chuck could be out more?
So would it be more accurate if I took a cut like 5" long and measured the furthest and nearest points from the chuck?
 
yes. I measure about 1/2" from the jaws and 6 1/" from the jaws - it makes all the calculations easy. If you don't have one, you can scrounge round and ground rods from photocopiers or anything that uses a round linear bearing. You can also use ground hydraulic rod if you are desperate (expensive).

If you have a hydraulic rebuilding shop nearby, they sometimes have a bin of 'ends' where they have shortened a hydraulic rod. These are not perfect - they vary about 1-2 thou in concentricity. but you can average your reading on 4 points and be more accurate than you need. In processing sometimes they are bent about .001 per foot. Again, acceptable for first order measurements.

-- Remember it doesn't really matter that much. A chuck that is .005 out can still do very accurate work. it just has to be done ion one setup, as much as possible. After that, you get really good at centering using your 4-jaw chuck!!
 
Hey everybody, so I've been using the lathe a little bit. I chucked an old atv cylinder in it to practice with boring. Is there supposed to be a way to clamp the cross slide when machining to keep it set? Maybe mine isn't setup properly, the know rotates very easily with very little resistance. And when I was taking a cut on the cylinder it was moving from where I set it just from vibration. I had to use a clamp to keep it from moving.
The other thing is the the cut I took wasn't smooth, it jad a ripple like appearance. is that just from chatter? It was a 3/4 boring bar, I set it center jaw height using a drill bit as reference.
 

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Most cross slides have a gibb lock on the right hand side, using an allen wrench.
 
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