For your shopsmith owners out there (like me, I guess) There is a new
variable speed motor upgrade to your Mk5, called the SS Power upgrade, and
will set you back about 1500 simoleons. Too rich for my blood, but it sure is
a nice setup. Or you can spend the bigger bucks yet, for a Mk7 SS.
tom koehler


--
I will find a way or make one.

On Thu, 2 Dec 2010 22:35:38 -0600, tom koehler
wrote:

For your shopsmith owners out there (like me, I guess) There is a new
variable speed motor upgrade to your Mk5, called the SS Power upgrade, and
will set you back about 1500 simoleons. Too rich for my blood, but it sure is
a nice setup. Or you can spend the bigger bucks yet, for a Mk7 SS.
tom koehler

DAMN! You can buy a really nice lathe for that much..
Looking out at the carport, the SS is surrounded by a table saw, a planer, a
belt/disk sander and a router table, the total of which were less that $1,500


mac

Please remove splinters before emailing

In article . net,
tom koehler wrote:

For your shopsmith owners out there (like me, I guess) There is a new
variable speed motor upgrade to your Mk5, called the SS Power upgrade, and
will set you back about 1500 simoleons. Too rich for my blood, but it sure is
a nice setup. Or you can spend the bigger bucks yet, for a Mk7 SS.
tom koehler

If you go beyond "bolt-on-from-the-factory" you can do it for a LOT less
money. Got one with a broken speed control section which I'm refitting,
expect to come out for less than the parts to rebuild what it started
with in 1950.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by

In article . net,
tom koehler wrote:

For your shopsmith owners out there (like me, I guess) There is a new
variable speed motor upgrade to your Mk5, called the SS Power upgrade, and
will set you back about 1500 simoleons. Too rich for my blood, but it sure is
a nice setup. Or you can spend the bigger bucks yet, for a Mk7 SS.
tom koehler

If you go beyond "bolt-on-from-the-factory" you can do it for a LOT less
money. Got one with a broken speed control section which I'm refitting,
expect to come out for less than the parts to rebuild what it started
with in 1950.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by

On Fri, 3 Dec 2010 1:05:22 -0600, mac davis wrote
(in message ):

On Thu, 2 Dec 2010 22:35:38 -0600, tom koehler
wrote:

For your shopsmith owners out there (like me, I guess) There is a new
variable speed motor upgrade to your Mk5, called the SS Power upgrade, and
will set you back about 1500 simoleons. Too rich for my blood, but it sure
is
a nice setup. Or you can spend the bigger bucks yet, for a Mk7 SS.
tom koehler

DAMN! You can buy a really nice lathe for that much..
Looking out at the carport, the SS is surrounded by a table saw, a planer, a
belt/disk sander and a router table, the total of which were less that $1,500


mac

Please remove splinters before emailing

well, yes, you can - obviously. The attraction for the SS is that it is a
space saver. My man-cave is extremely small, not unlike being in a submarine
(my former environment before getting my SS many years ago) I have all the
power tools I want in this rig, and have learned how to use it to my
satisfaction. For me, this is a great solution. As it is I sometimes have to
crab-walk sideways in my shop to do what I want.
Respectfully submitted,
tom koehler


--
I will find a way or make one.

On Fri, 3 Dec 2010 9:15:11 -0600, Ecnerwal wrote
(in message
):

In article . net,
tom koehler wrote:

For your shopsmith owners out there (like me, I guess) There is a new
variable speed motor upgrade to your Mk5, called the SS Power upgrade, and
will set you back about 1500 simoleons. Too rich for my blood, but it sure
is
a nice setup. Or you can spend the bigger bucks yet, for a Mk7 SS.
tom koehler

If you go beyond "bolt-on-from-the-factory" you can do it for a LOT less
money. Got one with a broken speed control section which I'm refitting,
expect to come out for less than the parts to rebuild what it started
with in 1950.



your response is interesting, and I'm interested in more details when ou get
the time, please

tvkoehler

at

frontiernet.net

tom koehler

--
I will find a way or make one.

In article . net,
tom koehler wrote:

On Fri, 3 Dec 2010 9:15:11 -0600, Ecnerwal wrote
(in message
):

In article . net,
tom koehler wrote:

For your shopsmith owners out there (like me, I guess) There is a new
variable speed motor upgrade to your Mk5, called the SS Power upgrade, and
will set you back about 1500 simoleons. Too rich for my blood, but it sure
is
a nice setup. Or you can spend the bigger bucks yet, for a Mk7 SS.
tom koehler

If you go beyond "bolt-on-from-the-factory" you can do it for a LOT less
money. Got one with a broken speed control section which I'm refitting,
expect to come out for less than the parts to rebuild what it started
with in 1950.
Pardon, that should be 1953 - it's not an ER10, it's a Mark V greenie
with no access hole in the back of the headstock (first year of
production, very hard to oil the speed control without that hole).

your response is interesting, and I'm interested in more details when ou get
the time, please

My first attack on this idea came when the Reeves drive control bearing
on Grandpa's "bought it new from the factory and he passed it on to me
while still kicking" Mark V crapped out when I was in the midst of some
turning I needed to get done ASAP. Suffice to say that I had a VS drive
system for another lathe handy, and the lathe in question was not handy,
so I made use of the jointer output shaft as a VS motor input shaft and
had a Really Quiet Mark V that would actually go Slow. Of course it had
a motor strapped to the ways beyond the headstock and this limited its
use somewhat. I opted to upgrade that machine from Gilmer (both of my
Mark V's are circa 1953) to poly V (with two-bearing quill) when I was
replacing the failed bearing on the speed quadrant, but left the drive
system otherwise stock. However, the nugget of an idea had been planted.

I found a cheap and severely *******ized Mark V of the same year and
bought it. A previous owner was not terribly clever about replacing the
Gilmer belt, and hacked up the machine to replace it with an external V
belt. Ugly. I got that one a poly-V quill as well (might only be the
one-bearing version - I discovered SS parts on fleabay and they were
mostly a lot less expensive than what SS wanted to sell them for direct.)

I have not quite settled on replacing the intermediate shaft (aka the
jointer shaft) directly with a VS motor (which would allow shrinking the
headstock by quite a bit, but limits torque and speed options) or
replacing it with a jackshaft so that the VS motor can be optimised for
higher or lower spindle speeds though an intermediate belt change. The
project is ongoing, and not the top of the list most of the time. A
third possibility is bypassing the jointer shaft (I have one, but hardly
use it) and getting some adjustment without a jack shaft through
multiple pulley sizes on the motor.

In either case I'll swap the speed dial over to driving the speed
control potentiometer for the VS motor. Due to availability, familiarity
(I started in on variable speed drives for lathes when DC was the only
common option) and lack of cost (free if you watch the curbs and
advertisements), I'm prone to using Treadmill DC motors - just derate
the claimed HP by about half. ie, a "2hp" treadmill motor is more likely
to be about 1 hp in practice, I find. If not fond of surplus (or fond of
different surplus), the newer and better way is a 3-phase motor with a
Variable Frequency Drive - at the 1&2 HP level there are 1-phase-in,
3-phase out versions that make this reasonable to do in the home shop
(though you'll need 220V for the 2HP drive.) The VFD option is supposed
to have better torque at low speeds, and you don't have brushes to
replace.

If you don't hate the noise of the Reeves drive quite as much as I do,
retrofitting a long-enough shaft (or finding a DC or 3-phase motor with
a long-enough shaft) to simply swap in place of the present motor and
using the Reeves for torque control might be simpler. I'm sick of
listening to it, personally. I like a quiet shop whenever possible, and
I was blown away at how much quieter the old greenie was, when still on
its original quill bearings, with the Reeves out of the system.

In either case provide a separate full-speed fan for cooling, rather
than depending on a fan on the motor shaft which does not cool well at
low motor speeds.

Somewhere back in the mists of some archive there should be a posting
from when I first made the temporary external conversion to get the job
I was working on done.

While I learned to turn on the SS, I don't regard it as particularly
great lathe, because it's not. However, it still does the best job of
being lots of things in a very small space, and it IS a good drill
press, horizontal boring machine, and disc sander - and its belt sander
works fine. I hate it as a tablesaw, had to learn to work around the
many flaws it has a lathe (light, too fast at "low", flexes too much)
and am not too fond of it at all as a router and shaper. At one time I
really wanted the bandsaw - at this point, I'd rather have a separate
unit in a larger size. Giving it a decent low speed and taking away 90%
of the drive noise does make it a much nicer lathe, but it's still going
to be a limited one - which is OK if it's also being the one power tool
that fits in your shop. OTOH, off the shelf you can get something like a
Jet mini lathe that takes up very little space and is a much better
lathe, while not being everything else the SS is.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by

On Fri, 3 Dec 2010 13:41:24 -0600, Ecnerwal wrote
(in message
):


My first attack on this idea came when the Reeves drive control bearing
on Grandpa's "bought it new from the factory and he passed it on to me
while still kicking" Mark V crapped out when I was in the midst of some
turning I needed to get done ASAP.

In either case I'll swap the speed dial over to driving the speed
control potentiometer for the VS motor. Due to availability, familiarity
(I started in on variable speed drives for lathes when DC was the only
common option) and lack of cost (free if you watch the curbs and
advertisements), I'm prone to using Treadmill DC motors - just derate
the claimed HP by about half. ie, a "2hp" treadmill motor is more likely
to be about 1 hp in practice, I find. If not fond of surplus (or fond of
different surplus), the newer and better way is a 3-phase motor with a
Variable Frequency Drive - at the 1&2 HP level there are 1-phase-in,
3-phase out versions that make this reasonable to do in the home shop
(though you'll need 220V for the 2HP drive.) The VFD option is supposed
to have better torque at low speeds, and you don't have brushes to
replace.


Somewhere back in the mists of some archive there should be a posting
from when I first made the temporary external conversion to get the job
I was working on done.





Thanks for the info on the speed control setup you used.
tom koehler

--
I will find a way or make one.