Well, I'm having one of those nice reverse-midas days when everything I touch turns to dog doo.
Plan D was to finish milling out some dihedral braces for an almost-ready-to-fly kit that I'm building. After setting everything up and turning on the switch I find that the spindle on my Smithy 3-in-1 machine's milling head won't turn.
The spindle rides in tapered bearings in the quill, which are adjusted by a round nut. The sheet metal retainer for the nut either never got bent into place to prevent the nut from turning or it bent itself out of the way. The bearings were way too tight -- to the point where there's some bluing of the spindle on the bottom end. The grease in the bearings has obviously overheated and left each roller bedded in it's own little custom-made varnish pocket.
So I have two questions:
For the short term, is there anything that'll likely dissolve this varnish? I can scrape it off the outer races with my fingernails, but the rollers are retained onto the inner races & I can't get to it. I'd like to soak it off if possible, although I may just leave things fairly loose & make my dang cut to get through today.
For the longer term, how much of a chance is there that I can get these bearings from a local bearing house? Should I just be applying to Smithy for new ones? If I'm going to go to the trouble of pulling those outer races I darn well want to put in decent bearings rather than Chinese crap.
Thankee much.