On Sun, 02 Sep 2007 19:05:01 -0700, "
wrote:

Damn I hate that, have to do it over again :-(

Hi Jesse
I typed a whole page it seems (I'm a very slow typist ;-) also) and it
went in that black hole again, darn.
Anyway I started turning on a similar lathe, just a few feet longer,
total length over 12 feet long.
My Dad had bought that lathe at a shipyard bankruptcy sale around
1930.
It had a 4 or 5 stepped flat belt pulley, it's been a while ;-)),
there was a split main shaft, that is a inner and outer that could be
locked/unlocked and a secondary shaft with gears on both ends could be
cantilevered in to the gears of the main shaft, so you would get
another 4 or 5 speeds extra low.

This one's got something I haven't quite got figured out, though it
may be similar to what you're describing- there's a big handle that
pulls a ring (maybe the pulleys, but it's still sitting on a trailer
50 miles away, so I can't go check until next weekend when I bring it
home...) over a lever on the main drive shaft. When the lever is
free, the drive pullies turn easily by hand- when the lever is held
down, it still turns relatively easily, but everything seems to slow
down. I thought it was a clutch at first, but it must be to run it
extra low.

If you want to use the old setup, should work just fine, and would
also keep everything original, if you're interested in that.
They used 2 belts one flipped a half turn and the other one just
normal, those would run on 3 side by side pulleys, the center one was
narrower than the 2 other ones and it was the driving pulley, the 2
other pulleys are idler pulleys, the belts have a 2 forked (belt mover
I'll call them) that sit on a shaft and are adjustable side ways, and
there is a handle you could reach that would move the forks both ways,
so one way would be forward drive for the lathe and the other way
reverse.

Yeah, I think I'm going to use as much of the old setup as possible,
just for the novelty of it if nothing else. So what you're saying is
that all three of the steps on the pulley had belts on them? If
that's the case, would you flip the second step pulley the opposite
way to keep the ratios the same? It was my assumption that the steps
worked the same way as on a modern lathe, where you could pick any
pair of steps to get a different range of speeds.

The original motor that came with the lathe was and still ?? is used
(last time that I was there, was a few years ago) it is a 2 HP 3 phase
380 Volt open cage motor.
The belt from the motor would run to the main power distributing
shafts larger pulley, where the 2 flat belts pulley also was clamped
to, (most of the old pulleys where made in 2 halves so you could add
or remove them from the long shafts that where commonly used), ours
had only the forging hammer connected to it.

Assuming that I don't have a three-phase converter (and that's a real
good assumption to make,) what do you think a guy could get away with
using a 220v motor? I'd like to avoid investing in a 3-phase setup,
at least for now when it'd only be used for one tool. Maybe in a few
years if I've got a little extra money or a good opportunity to get a
machining center secondhand the 3-ph converter will make more sense.

Changing of carriage speed was by manually changing/exchanging the
gears around, the lathe did have automatic feed and cross feed, reason
for a couple fixed change gears :-((.

That explains the bucket of gears- I figured that was what they were
for. That should be a bit of goofing around right there to figure out
which combinations correspond to various tpi counts. I'm thinking
that color-coding the center of the gears might not be a bad idea.

If you don't want to use the old setup, you could use a multi-v belt
to run on the flat belt pulleys, but you might run to fast by directly
going and probably need a jack shaft.

Nah, I think I'll stick with the old setup, since it's still there.
Kind of like the oilers it comes with- a guy could probably find zirc
fittings that might be easier to work with, but they just don't look
as neat as the old brass oilers.

Anyway a nice project to work on, good luck with it.

Thanks!