Gears - Oil - Grease ?

[Jake M]

So for my old South Bends, they rely on the "total loss" oiling, as did many wartime era machines. Keep all the moving bits nicely oiled, then you know that all the oil you put in at the upper regions eventually ends up "down there " somewhere, and the arrangements to collect it up are kinda "non-existent".

If you want to do this, grease technically will protect gears... The gears on the back of the lathe are not under heavy load, so they're actually pretty forgiving as far as the gear teeth go. I don't use grease, but it certainly would cover tooth wear issues, although it will still need to be refreshed periodically, and the dried up binder material cleaned now and then..

It relies on one being daily diligent, and looking after the cleaning and oiling with every use.

That will never go away. The machine was built with that maintenance philosophy in mind. You can reduce the frequency of actually lubricating some things, but the daily check/inspection will not go away.

So to grease. We know hard chips and grindings and general dirt can stick in it, and not get carried away by moving oil, but if one could effectively "cover up and seal off" the routes where junk can get in onto the gears, is there any much downside to adopting grease as the gear lubricant?

I see two downsides to it. Your daily check becomes a daily check for chips/trash, etc, so you've still got to do a thing, even though it's a different thing. And you've still got to oil a couple of pivots in there anyhow, which are not really appropriate for grease, so you've still got to take your oil can there anyhow.

If you're worried about the mess and the loss of oil from the gears, let me suggest that you're "probably" using too much oil. The gear teeth should stay with a film of oil, but if there's any "liquid oil", in drops, either dropping or forming, that's not doing anything for your lubrication. What's protecting the gears is the film. Like the film that's left on turned part after you wipe the cutting oil off with a rag. Looks clean but still is slippery. That film is what does the protection. The gears back there are not doing any hydrodynamic lubrication. The gears that pivot on their shaft- Those are. They want some oil.

I use plain old ISO 68, and don't get a lot of drips. What I do comes from the pivots, as while they could do with less (a lot less), I want to see something coming back out. The gears, that takes a drop (literally) about once in a blue moon. One drop on each gear path, and it will migrate it's self right around every gear in the chain. Where there's an offset in the gear train, the stud gear for instance, another drop there on the "new" gear path, and that drop will migrate all around those gears too.

So my thought is that while yes, grease would be fine for the gear teeth, I just don't see any real benefit, as they don't take enough oil to speak of, and I'm going to be standing there on any given day that I use the lathe, with an oil can in hand, oiling the pivots and eyeballing the gears anyhow.

You won't hurt it though by using grease, so long as you keep the chips and crud out, and don't neglect the other service points back there.