Tonight my buddy and I went to look at a venerable old 10" Sheldon lathe. It's a model L-62 with a nice long bed. There is a lot of crust and dirt and a little rust on it, but there is also some severe wear and some damage and one thing I couldn't make work, and I have some questions for anyone who knows these machines.
Here is an overall view:
formatting link
When I got far enough along to put some oil in the spindle bearings and spun up the spindle, I immediately noticed a horrible noise coming from the back. It turned out the horizontal drive unit's jackshaft hadn't been sufficiently lubricated, or had been overtightened, or both, and it had worn at least 1/16" of slop in it so it was just rattling around noisily.
Here's a picture:
formatting link
The headstock has a quickchange gearbox. All the visible gears on the lathe (including those in the gearbox) are intact and there was no visible pitting on the gear faces. However, the shifting arm on the quickchange gearbox is broken:
formatting link
It could be persuaded to stay in gear, though, and maybe another arm is available (no, the busted off part isn't there). So I stuck a 2x4" piece under it and went to check out the powerfeeds.
Uh-oh. Maybe I couldn't figure out the clutch, but I could not make the powerfeeds work. Here's a picture of the apron, anyone know how these clutches are supposed to work?
formatting link
This old machine looks to me to be restorable but quite a bit of work would be needed. However, if the apron's clutch is busted, that might be a bigger problem than I'd want to take on.
My buddy is going to pass on this lathe, not himself feeling qualified to get this one up and running again. There is no tooling whatever other than a rusty 3-jaw. No toolpost, no tailstock anything, no steady, no follower, no lathe centers, no dog plate, no 4-jaw, no nothing. $500 as it sits, in Snohomish, Washington.
Grant Erwin