Project: My "Big Nards" - Nardini Nodus 1760 Lathe

[pontiac428]

Sounds good, I'll clean you out if you're not planning to use them.

 

[mmcmdl]

Quick pic . Used them on my 17" Leblond which is gone . Have a Dorian BXA on the 14" Republic , so all these can go to make room . Off to work soon .

FWIW . We had a 20" Nardini down at the paper plant along with a 17" Colchester . The Nardini never got used and was in PERFECT condition . Don't know where it went when they closed the doors .

 

[pontiac428]

Where was I... without fail, cleaning and degreasing. First pass degreasing is knocking the chunks off with a rag and a putty knife. Second pass is with a hardcore degreaser (ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, blue can oven cleaner), and, if needed, the real McCoy (NaOH, yellow can oven cleaner). Third is just simple green and a rag. Of course, this does not mean that only three passes were made, no no, I was scrubbing this junk on weekends and evenings for months.

I pressure washed what I could, which isn't much. I wish I could have pressure washed the whole dang thing, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.





Meanwhile, I was amassing a pile of little things that take a long time to rebuild properly:


Here's the infamous WEG motor. It runs near silent and with zero vibration, and it even cleaned up like new- but started here.


I proceeded to scrub and scrub. After a while, something began to shine underneath! This is two months after arrival day, I don't know how many hours in, but a lot... I was working like a guy who just got a new machine, so, yeah.

 

[pontiac428]

Quick pic . Used them on my 17" Leblond which is gone . Have a Dorian BXA on the 14" Republic , so all these can go to make room . Off to work soon .

FWIW . We had a 20" Nardini down at the paper plant along with a 17" Colchester . The Nardini never got used and was in PERFECT condition . Don't know where it went when they closed the doors .

See, I thought you sold off those insert holders- I remember this from... uh, somewhere on this site. Yeah, PM me your price.

I see 20" Nardinis fairly regular in the industrial classifieds. They sure are a different beast, they have zero interchange with the 17". I'd love to find someone parting a 17, I found out yesterday that I have either a stripped gear or stripped drive collar in my carriage that only appears near the head stock, so I missed it in the demo and missed it in my tests. But I digress... So, thank god for flat-rate boxes, right?

 

[pontiac428]

Alright, now I've cleaned up the machine enough to touch without gloves on. Sort of. Okay, that's iffy.

Let's see what happens when I pull this out...


Well, we don't know what happened next, because the record does not show. Let's assume I had so much grease on my hands, face, and clothes that I'd had enough and threw in the towel. The last thing I remember before putting my jeans in the trash bin was holding my phone in my greasy fingertips and thinking there's no way I'm taking pics like this.

Meanwhile, this pile keeps growing, and waiting. Lurking in the corner by the parts washer. Oh, yes, this pile will get its due attention. And McMaster-Carr will be sending me a personally addressed Christmas card this year because of this pile:

 

[pontiac428]

A little diversion. I went through with rebuilding the circulating oil system because I will need it. It ended up being a little bit of exercise to piece it together right (steel and stainless, no yellow metal) but the result is cool. I bought a German made high pressure stainless valve on ebay for a good price, but I had to bore and re-thread it to fit my honey fountain. That became the on/off switch. Then I got a stainless needle valve from China that needed to be bored and the needle seat re-profiled to work as a flow control valve. Then, the aesthetics had to be right, so I applied color to the hand controls.

 

[pontiac428]

I knew I had a picture somewhere! The valve had a tiny little orifice, so I opened it up to 5/16 and profiled the seat to match area for area.



And remember those stripped bolts for the compound hold-down? Very metric and very not a catalog part. I ordered 8mm T-nuts, setup studs, and flange nuts to do it right. I welded the studs with a quick fill on the bottom of the t-nuts, but not before cutting down six faces on each T-nut. The hard, hardened, heat treated in the USA steel T-nuts. Then I cried about my end mill. When I was done, I put my big boy pants back on and I blued them.

 

[pontiac428]

Speaking of bluing things, I was able to save the threads on those bed gap taper pins. At the time, I was freaked about replacing stuff like that. Now I know better, metric taper pins are cheap as chips and totally standardized. I wouldn't have bothered had I known it at the time.

 

[pontiac428]

Another dilemma was what to set the machine down on. Machine feet were needed, but what am I going to find in M24x2 thread? The nice PolyMount store-bought machine feet like I have my mill on are spiffy, but metric stops at... M12? Nope. Some company in Switzerland has them for $150 each, but... eight times? Nope. Turns out M24x2 is what they like to use in Europe to bolt the props on their wind turbines, and lo and behold, my thread size was available in a 100mm bolt made from the finest Swedish steel for $7.74 apiece. Suits me! For feet, I piloted a hole in eight hockey puck size bits of leaded low carbon and carved out a dimple. More on the feet later.

 

[john.oliver35]

I'll skip ahead a bit, because right at this point my big RPC arrived!

You may think that by having it on a dolly and in my driveway was good enough... This big ol' pig kicked my butt up the steps and across the yard.
View attachment 444179


The WEG motor on the Nardini has a 5 hp wind and an 8 hp wind. I had to buy a 20 hp rotary power converter to start that motor, apparently the Brazilian AC motors have high inductance. That means #6 wire and an 80-amp breaker.
View attachment 444178

Everything done up nice:
View attachment 444177View attachment 444175

I haven't been able to get away from EU appliances. I'll have to wait for that Bosch and Karcher stuff to wear out. Might take a while, so I'll add some 15 amp Schucko outlets (overdriven at 60 hz, but the motors don't care). This configuration is legally NEC exempt if you follow the wires.
View attachment 444176

I installed interphase volt/amp meters. They have a fast enough response rate to be useful. I also gave the 20 hp RPC an appropriate name tag:
View attachment 444174

And provided my 5 hp RPC with a similar name tag while I was at it!View attachment 444173:

Love the names! Just hope neither detonates in the shop!