I witnessed the reenlistment of several second-tour GIs who wanted badly to get out of Germany and back to Nam.
If I understood them right, in the US and Germany they were Hispanic but in Vietnam they became Rich White Americans.
Most people left the Kaserne only to go drinking in English-speaking bars. It wasn't generally considered a good assignment, even in the university party town of Heidelberg (where I spent every off-duty minute).
My first assignment was Ft. Rucker, Alabama. I'll bet you can guess its nickname! I was offered a civil service job there, but learned that it was second only Washington DC for transfer requests to leave. The other problem with the offer was that I would be working with a real carpetbagger. I told my civilian section chief that I appreciated the offer, but another couple months there and I would have to 'kill the carpetbagger'. He turned red and said, I understand. I wish I could get rid of him, but he's brown nosed too many important people to fire him.
My other assignment was Ft. Greely where the official low temperature record was -69F. The unofficial temperature was -79F at one of the sites off main base were equipment was cold weather tested.
Those are the Zamac (pot metal) gears, then. They sort of
*look* like cast aluminum, but they aren't. (And just as well, aluminum gears meshing with aluminum will gall badly over time.) If you *have* to have aluminum gears, have them mesh with steel or some other metal.
These are the threading gears (whether this is the 6" or the 10" or 12" Atlas), and having some missing will mean that there are some threads you can't cut (until you find or make replacement gears). There is no separate "feed" on these lathes. You have to use the half-nuts to drive the carriage, and if you want a fine feed, you have to build up the proper gear train, then change the gears to cut threads, then change back to cut fine finishes again. Lathes with a separate feed take the drive off either a separate rod or off a keyway milled in the leadscrew, and use that to drive a gear or so in the apron of the carriage. Best if you have both power feed (a significantly slower feed than the half-nuts give so you don't have to change things as often), and the cross feed (if present) is even slower. (Some Atlas 12" lathes have quick-change gearboxes, but I *think* that they still don't have separate feeds.
Keep some handy-wipes with an oil cutting filler because if you keep the gears properly lubricated, you will have black hands after changing them -- which sort of discourages changing them as often as you should.
FWIW, the back gears are Zamac too -- at least on the 6x18" which I still have.
Still -- as I said before, at $50.00, it is not a bad price. And it can get you experience in using a lathe, so you know what to look at/for when it is time to get a bigger/better one.
He said that his dad was a machinist, and that he's been moving machine tools for 30 years. He didn't use the word Rigging, so that makes me think he just drove the truck from site to site. :)
How hard would it be to modify it to use a stepper or servo drive?
The last lathe I used was a worn out navy surplus lathe in high school. Both of which are long gone. I doubt that the new high school even has a metal shop, but they spent millions on the football field.
A lathe is still useful with only a handwheel to turn the leadscrew. The 6" Sears/AA is like that, the Prazi doesn't even have halfnuts to release the carriage.
A lot of what I need a lathe for won't require the gears. I have been looking at some Arduino CNC projects and thought that a conversion might be interesting if the repair and conversion costs are close.
Early in '71 for me too . The draft was breathing it's last dying gasps , and I didn't wanna sleep in the first clean mudhole I came across . Three hots and a cot ...
The power longitudinal and cross feeds, if it has them, should still be good enough to rough-turn stock close enough. If it's worn you may have to manually finish diameters to measured size in short sections anyway.
What you really want is an ELS (electronic lead screw, (See
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one version, and some of it's variants.
But as for buying it, I think it is a steal at $50 I thought I was lucky when I got mine for $100. Including boxes of misc parts that turned out to have a watchmakers lathe in it too)
I found that group this morning. It's what I had in mind, but I was thinking of using a Arduino Mega 2560 as the controller. I have 35 new Grayhill 88JB2-252 20 button matrixed keypads, several 16*2 LCDs and maybe a motor that will drive a leadscrew. There is supposed to be source code available to convert G code to run on that board. I have also downloaded Linux CNC and I am wading through the documentation. I am thinking about building a mini CNC milling machine with the pile of stepper motors I salvaged from some large printers. I have a hobby sized mill, and a working lathe would let me make the parts I need,
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is a picture of the keypads. New markings can be made as a label to cover the entire module. A pair would give me 40 switches, which is five more than the ELS project used.
I love that "POR" (Price On Request) marking on lots of them. :-)
:-)
Well ... you don't *need* rigging when moving a 6" or even a 12" Atlas lathe. :-)
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Not at all difficult for use while *turning*.
However, for threading, it gets a lot trickier. You need a way to send the speed and angular position of the spindle to control the feed. Yes, it can be done, but you are good way towards a CNC machine by then, so you might as well go the whole way. :-)
So -- you should be able to deal with this one as well. Certainly not be seriously disappointed, anyway. :-)
The 6" Atlas won't have power feeds -- either axis (unless you count using the leadscrew and half nuts). I'm not sure whether any of the 12" or 10" Atlas machines ever had it or not.
Some South Bend lathes had it, some did not. My 12x24" Clausing has both.
Sounds good. If you get it as a project, you should be fine. (You may have to have the bed re-ground, depending on how worn it happens to be.)
No kidding. I walk out of a store when I see things with no prices.
He claimed that he had moved machinery for 30 years.
Add an encoder on the spindle to read the actual speed and use that to set the timing, then the processor generates the drive in sync for whatever ratio you need. Not as ridgid as gears, but will let you do small jobs OK.
Since most parts will be small, I should be able to get by with almost any old lathe. the only other lathe that was availible in the area was over 16 feet long, and wouldn't fit in my shop even though all it would have cost was hauling it across town.
Indeed. I took Metal Shop, Wood Shop and Drafting in Jr high school, then two years of Electronics and another year of wood shop in high school. The Electronics classes were held in the metal shop and taught by the same teacher so we had access to all the tools, if our classwork was done and for an hour after school every day. It's the same shop that I used for a classroom to teach a night adult education course on small appliance repair, while I was still in high school.
Well for threading You also need to be able to sync not just to spindle speed, but to spindle position, unless you are going to cut that thread in a single pass. Thus you also need an index pulse. jk
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