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

[pontiac428]

I want to take a moment to share with you where so much of the magic happens. No, it's not the boudoir, but it is under a blanket. A Russian-made flaxen fire blanket! Such mystery, such provocation! Such unfinished walls!


It's a HF parts washer, complete with genuine 1990's contingency stickers. I've owned this thing for awhile, like since I was 20. It gets a solid green light for HF tools.


What's the big deal, anyway? Well, it's one of my most heavily used tools, and people like photos. Let's look under the hood:


Okay, no surprises there. But if you've never seen the inside of a parts washer, now you have.

Here's the tip of the month: Buy only washing solvent for cleaning parts, never fuel. Fuel is full of rank stinky toxic junk because it's end of pipeline cut. It doesn't need to be pure for any reason. Cleaning solvent, aka stoddard solvent, is highly refined compared to kerosene, white gas, lamp oil, or whatever cockamaime hillbilly stuff your grandpa used. It's made for workers to hand wash parts with, so it is low odor, dries clean, and is generally pure straight chain hydrocarbon chains with around 8 to 12 carbons, no branching, no cyclics, no heteroatoms. Because of that, it is very low toxicity, with the 8-hour exposure limit way up around 600 ppm. For a 12 carbon chain, that equates to like 3 grams per cubic meter. With a vapor pressure around 5 mm Hg, it only evaporates when heated. Washed parts dry in the sunlight and leave no oily residue. The capacity for 5 gallons of solvent is unreal, I've cleaned numerous junkyard transmissions, engines, pumps, gearboxes, on and on, and still don't notice much degradation in performance. It lasts for several years, and disposes as waste oil. So it really pays for itself in the long run.

 

[pontiac428]

Great job on the rebuild, and enjoying seeing the steps to get it there. I was looking for a 12” Nardini, but ended up getting a PM1236t instead since I only saw one for sale anywhere close to me, and that didn’t last long.

I started eyeballing the Nardini lathes over ten years ago while I was living in Germany. I spotted a 12" at the time, but have only seen one listed on the aggregate sites since. They made every increment up to 30". I was originally hoping for a 14" or 15", the 15" in particular is very stout. I found a 14" in western Idaho fully tooled for $4500 a few years back, clean too, but I would have had to break the sound barrier to get there in time, that beauty sold quick. Found a 15" in Portland that also sold immediately.

I realized I had to put my money on the table if I was going to get what I want, and not buy a total pig of a machine. So that's what I did, after being fully certain I wasn't going to get a reasonably clean machine close enough to pick up myself. First, if I'm shipping across the country, what difference does it make if I get a 14x40 or a 17x60? Not much in price, really. If I am going through with it, I want it all- size, power, origin, history. Instead of looking for the bargain, I was set to optimize my outcome. Like my current mill, this is a purchase that I intended to make only once, and the estate auctioneers can figure out how to get it out of here in a couple decades, hopefully.

Fantastic work! Beautiful lathe. I enjoyed your slide show.
Martin

Thanks. I didn't intend for it to be like family photos on a projector carousel, but I kind of narrated it that way!

Very nice lathe, I’m jealous! You’ve skipped a few steps in the upgrade path from your Atlas to this

Do you have projects in mind that need the size of this lathe or is it more of a case that you wanted a bigger lathe and you’ll find projects that fit?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The Atlas was a wonderful tool that represents a metal lathe well. It's capable of so much. But it was such a light duty machine, and I've got heavy duty aspirations. I want to modify axles, splines are no problem, I can fit at least 4' between divider centers on the mill table , but it takes lots of power to cut alloy steel shafts down. A project I want to get on right away is a hydraulic rotary draw bender. I can make very large dies... square tubing dies, sch40 dies, DOM dies, up to a 12' CLR if I take the gap out.

She’s a beaut great job on the resto. No scrapping on the cross slide?

This lathe has no scraping anywhere, except for the gap, the compound pivot and the plinth for the tailstock- where parallel and thickness precision are required. Everything is fitted, as I found out with the cylinders and internals in the steady rest, but not recognizably hand fitted. I'm guessing the lathes were ground and assembled by tolerance matching, while fitted parts were fixture machined instead of filed and scraped.

This lathe was built in 2002 by a company that started up with German oversight. It's a modern machine in every sense, despite being a manual machine in a CNC era. I don't know what kind of grinding juju those guys who built the machine knew, but it's tight and smooth! Everything is induction hardened, and there's not a heck of a lot of bed wear. Other than using the Richard King-recommended scotchbrite wheels for cleaning, and knocking down any nicks down with a stone, all the surfaces are just being run as-is.

It's a hell of a lot of work rehabing a machine, especially if your going to paint it. I've been going through the same process on my Acra mill, and am almost done with all disassembly and cleaning. Still debating what to do about paint, if anything. Yours is looking good. Mike

You get a solid tie for what's more involved, rebuilding the lathe or the mill. Either way, it cost/took time/feels like a car project. Same kind of timeline. A gearbox is a gearbox, paint is paint, wires is wires. When people ask what I've been up to, they don't get it when I said I acquired the means of production, capital equipment in the form of a huge industrial lathe. So I tell them it's like a car project, and they say "oh." and change the subject. I can't relate it to people, that is why I come here.

 

[Ischgl99]

I started eyeballing the Nardini lathes over ten years ago while I was living in Germany. I spotted a 12" at the time, but have only seen one listed on the aggregate sites since. They made every increment up to 30". I was originally hoping for a 14" or 15", the 15" in particular is very stout. I found a 14" in western Idaho fully tooled for $4500 a few years back, clean too, but I would have had to break the sound barrier to get there in time, that beauty sold quick. Found a 15" in Portland that also sold immediately.

I realized I had to put my money on the table if I was going to get what I want, and not buy a total pig of a machine. So that's what I did, after being fully certain I wasn't going to get a reasonably clean machine close enough to pick up myself. First, if I'm shipping across the country, what difference does it make if I get a 14x40 or a 17x60? Not much in price, really. If I am going through with it, I want it all- size, power, origin, history. Instead of looking for the bargain, I was set to optimize my outcome. Like my current mill, this is a purchase that I intended to make only once, and the estate auctioneers can figure out how to get it out of here in a couple decades, hopefully.

Where in Germany did you live? I lived in a small town in the north called Oelde for 7 months for training at the factory for the company I worked for, and probably spent another 5-6 months there on various business trips over the next several years. I’ve only been back once in the last 14 years, that’s one part of working for them I really miss. I believe they used the same green paint on their machines, I seem to recall the touch up cans we bought in the States never matched what they did in Germany either.

I never saw a Nardini in person, but when I started researching what to get, they always got recommended, and the 1230 was the perfect size to get in my basement. The one I came across was only a couple hours from me, but I was still researching the brand, and waited too long. My wife nixed the idea of building a separate shop due to cost, so everything needs to go in the basement, otherwise I would have been looking at something bigger. The joke will be on her when I die and SHE needs to figure out how to get them out of the basement, then she’ll wish she approved the new shop building . I was trying to see how hard it would be to get a larger machine into the basement since the smaller ones are so rare when I saw PM had the 1236T in stock, so I figured get something before winter and then if the right thing came along, get that and sell what I have. Good thing I bought when I did, prices are $2,000 higher now than when I bought in 2020. I hear you about the bigger machines not costing much more, most of what I was looking at in the 17x40 range was cheaper than the smaller machines!

 

[pontiac428]

Where in Germany did you live?

I lived in Schweinfurt (where SKF, FAG, and Sachs make ball bearings) for almost 4 years on active duty, then I got my degree and got hired as a civilian in Landstuhl (Kaiserslautern) where I stayed for another 7 years. Obviously I loved it!

So when it comes to buying tooling, the hobby market drives prices for lathes up to 14", but once tooling gets up to 3/4"-1" or those Morse tapers get up to #4-5, the gouge prices drop off and it becomes a buyer's market.

I think I paid $125 for the new in box Klopfer live center below. IIRC, Traver's wants $600 for it.



I set a hard limit of $20 each on tool holders.



And people are so enamored with inserts that excellent USA brazed carbide gets ignored, look what $40 can buy:



Of course, knurling tools are stupid overpriced no matter what. This got me set up with a minimum for single and double cut knurls, but I'm sifting through the dregs here.



Chucks are definitely cheaper once you get over 8". I got the dog drive I needed.

 

[Ischgl99]

You made out like a bandit! If I wasn’t stuck in the basement, I definitely would have bought a bigger lathe, there is a decent supply of them in this area to choose from too.

I used to work for FAG and visited Schweinfurt a couple times, loved that area. I was mostly up in Aachen for the division I worked for while at FAG, but would have been very happy to visit Schweinfurt more often. For the company before that, after my initial training, I was the guy they sent to the factory for training on anything new and then trained the guys in North America. I tried to get a new position created that would need a couple years advanced training in Germany, got the Germans at the factory on board, told by my bosses in the States there was no plans to do that, then a couple months later the company sent someone else. He stayed in Germany, so when I quit, they offered that opportunity to me, but by that time I tired of traveling and was close to proposing to my wife and said no. Sometimes I wonder how my life would be different if I said yes to that opportunity and goodbye to my then girlfriend (now wife) lol. Maybe I would still be there too!

 

[pontiac428]

I like Aachen. Like most German cities, it was bombed flat in 1945, so it is now a modern city. At least the cathedral that Charlemagne was coronated in is still standing there. The regions of Germany are all so different, Aachen is sterile and has open space. Schweinfurt is in lower Franconian farm country, much more suburban (despite Schweinfurt also being bombed flat to stop the Germans from building airplanes or tanks). I ended up liking the Pfalz best of all, it's like Germany's backwoods of Kentucky. Gnomes make shoes out in the woods. The people slur and use regional slang, a stark contrast from northern Germans who put hard crisp consonants into their words and pronounce every letter. I never felt so at home. Luckily, my wife joined me for the second go-round, and it has enriched our lives from seeing a different perspective on society by living as the linguistically-challenged immigrant worker in another country. Put the shoe on the other foot for once.

 

[Ischgl99]

Yes, the cathedral in Aachen is beautiful, but unfortunately I never made it inside. I wish I brought my cameras on those trips back then, I don’t have many pictures from those trips.

I preferred the north, I could understand what they were saying. I worked in Bavaria for a couple weeks and I couldn’t understand a word of that dialect, but they took pity on me and spoke in Hochdeutsch.

An interesting story, this was before I started at FAG, I worked out of the Barden building in Danbury CT and one of the Barden guys said they had a big picture hanging in the production area of Schweinfurt taken from a B-17 during a bombing run. When FAG bought them, a group of Germans came to visit and were not amused when they were told they already hung up a picture of their factory lol.

 

[pontiac428]

There are some great pictures of the FAG and Sachs factory area after the bombing on a site called thirdreichruins.com. My dad's father in law was one of those bomber pilots, he remembered Schweinfurt and Wuerzburg from the cockpit. If the US had as much "ground zero" as Europe does, we'd probably be a much different society today. Instead, we're loud, aggressive, and we each have the carbon footprint of ten Europeans because of our lifestyle and transportation choices. The spoils went to the winner, then spoiled the winner. That's why the poster is uncouth. Remember George C. Scott's line, "It's a big plane, flying low. Jet exhaust frying chickens in the barnyard!"

 

[Ischgl99]

That certainly described Barden.

So, what was the next step in your restoration?

 

[pontiac428]

Next, I need to face the truth. I did find one major mechanical defect that I missed on initial inspection, and also missed during my first under power tests. In fact, I didn't discover it until last weekend when I tried to make some chips.

This lathe has two feed systems. The Germans call it a Leit und Zugspindel Drehmaschine (L&Z). The Leitspindel is the lead screw, used for threading. When more power is used than threading takes (which is pretty much everything), you use the Zugspindel (drive spindle), which is for feeds during all other operations. Then there's the transverse and longitudinal feeds from the drive spindle.

In the carriage, there is a drive nut driven by the drive spindle. The nut transfers movement 90 degrees via two gears. Either the nut hex is stripped, or the gears are. When my carriage is within 12" of the headstock, the drive spindle bucks and the carriage stops moving.

These two parts are what I am expecting to find damaged. Gears and shafts in general are easy enough to make, but I don't have a universal mill to make the worm gear, and I have not thought up a way to broach an inner hex (maybe 32mm across) on shaft #1549, which is the most likely culprit. Reason I think so is the carriage bucks and reacts where the drive spindle has wear near the head, but behaves perfectly elsewhere in the bed. If the gears are intact, I will probably braze fill and re-cut the inner hex, otherwise I expect to have to re-make the parts.

I purposefully avoided tearing apart the carriage during my rebuild, thinking I would do it "when it needs it". Life is what it is, so I get to do it now. I expect to be posting details soon. Meanwhile, I want to make a few more parts before putting the machine down again for that repair. Manually cranking doesn't leave a nice surface finish.