Cantek 1440, Birmingham, Wilton CT 1440, and others Rebuild

[turbo711]

Hello Mayhem. The hardest part in making the faceplate(s) is that the screw holes are not in a fixed measurement position. I think they are drilled by hand. They are all over the place. Also making the various holes line up is a pain as well. Precise measurements have to be made. The plate is made from .125 aluminum instead of the thin stuff the original was stamped from.

[turbo711]

Well, I got a chance to do some more on the lathe. Got the thread plate positioned and drilled the holes.

Really hard to push this tapered drill, bit it worked.

Made another shaft, spacer and bushing for the gearbox.

Picked up some unhardened 16mm drill rod to make some shafts with. The OD did not need to be turned so it worked out well. This stuff is fairly hard to cut.



Had to remove a bushing for the input shaft.





A bronze spacer was turned up and bored, to replace a worn aluminum one. Here is the keyway being cut. A keyway must be cut, so it can be installed on the shaft and clear a pre-installed key.



After measuring the shaper with a dial indicator high to low and side to side, and finding a tolerance of not more than .001" overall, I have even more respect for that machine. This gave me enough confidence to attempt a resurface of the tailstock base. But before that, I made a new cam for the tailstock. I used a method I watched on youtube to clamp the stock offset, and it worked great.


Back to the base.

The plan is to machine this surface and the bottom and make a shim to bring everything to the proper height.

After shaping the relatively easy to mount top of the base, a jig was welded up to enable mounting upside down on 123 blocks.

You can see the typical wear on the V way on the initial cut. The vise grips were used as a weight to keep the clapper down.

An angle of 45 degrees (90 included) was used for the V way. This proved to be the wrong angle, but as it turns out, that is of little consequence.

After machining the V way, the flat was skim cut, fit on the lathe, indicated with the cross-slide and skim cut again several times until the dial  indicator read less than .001" when slid from front to back. All happy with myself, I put the base on the lathe and proceeded to slide it down the entire length of bed. The base is completely stable at the end of the lathe and near the chuck, but where it where it slid back and forth for 15 years daily there is a rocking motion. The way looks good at a glance, much better than the Standard Modern, but when you look very closely, you can see the top flat of the V way narrows a bit in that area. This is depressing, I thought all the wear was concentrated on the unhardened base as opposed to the hardened bed. The tailstock will not operate reliably over this. So now I wish I inspected the bed more closely. I would probably not have got into this large project knowing that. I now have to make a jig to grind the tailstock ways. This is something that I think is kind of hackish, but it has to be done to make this lathe usable. I'm not going to dump more money into this thing getting the bed reground professionally. I guess what I'm saying is don't go trying to pollish up turds..... Oh yea the angle of the V ways are 43.5 degrees WTF! When I grind it, I'll make it 45, so I don't have to re-cut the base.
bye for now.

[turbo711]

Well after taking a break and getting some other stuff done around the house, I decided to do some more on the lathe. The tailstock ways issue definitely bummed me out and put me off the project, but what do I do, scrap the thing? So I finished the gearbox and that fueled me up a bit.

After getting a grinding wheel from Kijiji (my favorite place to buy stuff) an adapter bushing had to be made..

Tack it.

Weld it.

Turned part.

I wasn't feeling in the mood, so I didn't take as many pictures as usual. I had to come up with a way to hold the grinder rigidly and permit downfeed.


That's it for now. Things are slow going with driving kids to school and other responsibilities this time of year. This whole assembly will be mounted on some sort of sled at 45 degree angles to the bed. Fear leads to procrastination!

[Dr Stan]

One of my long term projects is to restore my circa 1900 planner so I can resurface small to medium (14" swing) lathes and B'port mills and clones.

Part of my rationale for raising the shop roof to 12' has to do with powering the planner from above.

The planner's ways are in excellent condition so any resurfacing should come out nice & straight.  I should have it up & running in about a year depending on the healing process of my foot.

[turbo711]

Once you get it going, I'm sure you will acquire a lot of new "friends" that just happen to have an older lathe! I have seen some youtube videos of planners, but never one firsthand. They look like a more versatile shaper to me. Hope you get the project going soon. I would love to see some pics.

Mark

[Dr Stan]

Learned to run both the planner & the shaper while I was in the Navy.  The planner was onboard the USS Gompers (a repair ship) and was a much newer open sided hydraulic version.  It so happened it was right next to one of the main fore/aft passageways on the 2nd deck.  I'd be making nice "little" 6's & 9's which went bouncing across the steel deck.  More than one person came up to the watertight door giving access to the shop, saw what I was doing, turned around and went another way.