I’ve kind of sat on the whole lathe thing for a few weeks, partly thanks to being ill, but also because once I got it in situ I ended up with a whole load of other stuff to deal with that I wasn’t expecting.
Today I decided that it was time to finish what I’d started.
The first job was to bolt the bed down. This was more fiddly than I was expecting, mostly because shifting the headstock end of the lath accurately to get the bolt holes to line up was a bit awkward. Eventually I got there and did all four bolts up finger-tight in case I needed any other adjustments later.
After that came the motor and gearing assembly. Because the motor is not original there are quite a few “adjustments” to the original design and getting the three bolts back in (four, counting the belt tensioner) was quite tricky because the new motor mount partially obstructs them. Again I left these finger-tight whilst I plugged in all the connections for the motor. I was very much hoping that I’d got those all right as but for the earth the remaining five (or six?) cores in the cable all have black sheathing. There’s no way to tell them apart.
With those connected I could re-fit the motor cover which uses four allen bolts. Unfortunately one didn’t really appear to fit correctly — it wasn’t long enough. I don’t know why we didn’t notice that when it came apart.
With the motor reassembled I fully-tightened all eight mounting bolts and before re-fitting the belt drive decided I’d try giving the motor a spin. It worked! Not that I as expecting any other result, obviously 😀
Refitting the drive belt was much easier than expected. It’s a link v-belt where the end of each link passes through the next two and was so stiff I was expecting trouble, but actually the “T” of each link pushed through quite easily.
Finally I re-fitted the forward/reverse switch cover, not least because without the cover all the terminals are exposed.
Then it was time to bite the bullet and check everything ran.
Wahey! 😀
There are still a couple of small jobs to do such as refitting the tailstock properly and fixing the handle on the apron wheel that sadly got broken in transit, but so far we’re looking good!