Licking my Wounds Lathe Rebuild Project

[awemawson]

Good or bad, a lot of time has been spent doing that repair. I don't know what your local shop rate is but your $500 is under £300 which doesn't buy much skilled time and machinery use.

Obviously it would have been best to source replacements but presumably that wasn't possible. The alternative would be to have the entire gears made from scratch but that would have cost very much more.

I would be tempted to set up a dummy pair of axles and run the gears together for a while, and then somehow put a load on them. Best if they are to fail, to fail outside the headstock.