Oil Change Fiasco

wolframore

wolframore

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I got my 3in1 a couple couple months ago and it's been sitting on the pallet and a dolly since then. This weekend I decided to take it apart completely and lift it up onto a permanent bench. So far so good. Draining the oil... eww it's very dark and had to make some gaskets with material from autozone.

1. take the tail stock off
2. Take the cross slide assy off
3. Take the milling head off
3. take the gear/electrical cover box off
4. skip the motor - can't get the cottor pins
5. Drain the oil and open all gear covers

So after spending most of my day taking this apart then putting it back together. I put oil in the machine.. oops didn't notice that the oil level was full of crud and over filled the oil. Now I'm running the machine and there's oil coming out the lathe spindle and the pulley in the box. I look in the oil viewer and it's full of foam. Ever have thick oil oozing everywhere? Yuck!

Drain the oil, clean foam, cleaned the gears and oil level viewer with mineral spirits and a small paint brush.

I had the wrong oil. Used Non-detergent ATF and some 90w gear oil. Duh, manual says 30W non-detergent compressor oil.

Run to Home Depot.

Now on second day... re-filled and it's finally standing on the bench. Runs beautifully but boy I won't make that mistake again. Didn't get to make anything this weekend because of the stupid mistake...
 
That's what I would consider a "good" mistake. You learned something (to the point that you will NEVER do it again) and nothing was ruined.

Most of mine are no where near as benign. :banghead: :biggrin:

-Ron
 
This time it was not a permanent mistake. In the process everything got oiled and cleaned very well... The only bad part is that there's still extremely heavy oil oozing out from under the lathe that I have to keep cleaning. Didn't know oil could get foamed up like that... wow.
 
You should see the floor around my mill from when I was "testing" out the one-shot oiler. I just bought the old mill and the oiler is down low on one side of the knee. I was kneeling down and kept pumping, figuring the lines were "dry" from sitting for who knows how long. I probably kept it up for a good ten minutes not seeing any oil appear on the ways etc. on the oiler side of the mill. I finally gave up, stood up and walked to the other side of the mill where I had this nice shiny black/brown "lake" covering about a quarter of my small shop's floor. :yikes: Still have lots of "Oil Dry"/kitty litter down trying to get it up. :banghead:

I know your pain. :biggrin:

-Ron
 
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