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:
http://www.tinyisland.com/images/Sheldon/overall.jpg

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 pictu
http://www.tinyisland.com/images/She...ftBoogered.jpg

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:
http://www.tinyisland.com/images/She...ShiftLever.jpg

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?
http://www.tinyisland.com/images/Sheldon/apron.jpg

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