Oh boy, I did it again! PRAZI SD400.

[Weldingrod1]

I'm glad I'm not the only one willing to do this level of work to improve lubrication!

Sent from my SM-S911U using Tapatalk

 

[RaisedByWolves]

I'm glad I'm not the only one willing to do this level of work to improve lubrication!

Sent from my SM-S911U using Tapatalk

I dont mind it really. You pay good money for the machine so why not allow it to last as long as possible while making it easier to use.



Continuing on, I needed to make oil grooves in the saddle V way and really didn't have a simple method to do this other than by hand. Another indispensable tool in my trade is a Dotco pencil grinder. Its slim, easy to handle for delicate work and really cant be beat. When I bought this one it was over $400 in 1990 dollars and was quite the outlay for a tool that only gets occasional use. Luckily for people new to this type of work you can get a decent reproduction for $40-50.






To make the grooves I carefully laid out lines where I wanted the grooves. Notice they are splayed out wider on one side. This is due to the oil groove I cut in the opposite side in the last post is off to the one side, and will likely put oil on that side first, so the corresponding grooves are farther apart on that side. This will in theory give the oil time to settle on top of the way and more evenly disperse between the two sets of grooves.



Laid out. The afore mentioned groove on the opposite side comes in from the bottom of this pic.








I used a 3/32 ball burr to make the grooves.










And a couple minutes later the grooves were done.









I then switched to a fine pointed burr to get into the part of the oil grooves that were too close together to get the ball burr in.









With that done I turned to installing ball oilers in the saddle, and small 1/8" copper tubes to carry oil to the longitudinal drive gear shafts.

I mounted the saddle on the apron and set it up in the mill. Here I'm finding the proper depth to drill the oil holes with a A drill which is the proper size for the 6mm ball oilers I purchased. I want the holes to go through the saddle and just touch the apron, but enough to form a slight funnel for the oil. I also want these ball oiler holes to be large enough to hold a bit of cotton to catch any debris that might get past the ball, so I drilled them through to the full size of the oilers minus a few thousands for a nice press fit.







Cleaned the chips off and pressed in the oiler buttons.








Having had the drill spot the apron, I picked up these locations and through drilled them down to the gear shaft bores with a #32 drill. You can see here the small funnel shaped spots and the copper tubes being brought to length.








And here they are brought to length but not yet seated.








Once they were fully seated I added just a small dot of the green elixir to cement them permanently in place. I used less than half a drop per end and let it wick around.

 

[RaisedByWolves]

Finishing off this part, I turned to reassembling the apron. I installed the gear shafts and the half nut assembly's and got those all adjusted and working nice.








Then when I went to install the travel handwheel I noticed this lathe did not have bluing on the handwheel retainer button, so I deceded to fix that as my new lathe with this retainer button blued looks nicer.


Here's the new lathe with the button blued for reference.








And the old lathes button in the white.









I tried using a cotton swab to apply the bluing but it wouldn't take evenly, so I dunked it in bluing instead.









Two rounds of dunking and cleaning with steel wool got me a nice deep black.









And then I assembled the apron.








So at this stage I need to rearrange my workroom to finish building this machine. I think I have 90% of the work on this done, but to get it off of the floor and onto the table to reassemble it, I need to finish my permanent bench for my lathe and mill.

Therefor I'm not sure when Ill be updating this. Hopefully being up against the wall here will get me working on the bench, I've only been prepping for it for about a year now. To be fair its not a small job. I purchased two hospital X-ray room doors that are lead lined. Handling, cutting and assembling these is/will be a two person job, so I have to rely on others as my wife cant life these to help me.

This, though time consuming will give me an extremely heavy and dense and vibration free surface to mount these machines on. At 70”x26”x1.5”, I think each half of this table top is around 180lbs so vibrations wont stand a chance.

Neither will my back of if I can’t get help lifting them into place.



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