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Help identifying and old hobby lathe.

FernieFatTony

New Member
Hello everyone. This is my first post as I am just joining the world of machining and metal working.

I recently bought a small hobby lathe as the price was right and everything seemed very sound and in good shape.

However I have had no luck in researching the make and model. It was imported by a company out of Winnipeg which doesn't seem to around any longer. I had hoped that maybe some of you that have in the game longer might recognize the lathe and be able to point me in the right direction.

Besides just a manual I do need a belt for it. It has a skinny v-groove belt that runs from the drive to the spindle but there is also a different pulley set for lower speeds. This looks like it would be driven by a toothed/cogged flat belt and you switch the v-belt onto it when you need to slow down.

I am attaching some pictures. Any help is appreciated.
 

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DavidR8

Scrap maker
Administrator
Moderator
Premium Member
Welcome to the forum.
I can’t identify to lathe for you but I can guarantee someone here can.
You did get the jaws for the chuck right?
 

FernieFatTony

New Member
Welcome to the forum.
I can’t identify to lathe for you but I can guarantee someone here can.
You did get the jaws for the chuck right?
Yes. Two sets of jaws, internal and external, as well as a 4 jaw and face plate. Live center and chuck for the tail end. Bunch of small insert tools and boring tools. All in all just about everything I need to start playing around.
 
Having some dimensions would be helpful, maximum swing diameter, distance between centers as examples. But it's probably either a 8" -9" swing lathe. These were originally cloned from the 8" swing Emco Austrian made lathes. http://www.lathes.co.uk/emcocompact8/ I'm unsure if the user manuals on the grizzly website go back far enough. But at one time they did sell a very close copy of what you have. If there's a tag still on your motor it might indicate it's country of origin, very likely that will be either Taiwan or China. A word of advise, the less you know the more careful you'll need to be for your own safety and for preventing machine damage. If it were me? It's pretty easy to see that lathe has been neglected and likely misused at least a bit. I'd start with a complete and thorough detail cleaning. I'd bet that 3 jaw chuck has never been cleaned since new and it's likely a bit stiff with chips and old congealed oil. Carefully disassemble it and especially mark the chuck pinions and holes for them on the chuck body so your sure everything goes back into where each part came from. If the chuck was well made, the jaws tips were ground after it's first assembly. So each pinions location helps to preserve any accuracy the factory built into it. My Emco heavy duty chucks are quite specific in the user instructions about those pinion locations when disassembling the chucks. One way to tell if that is a well made chuck, look for a O mark at one of the chuck pinions, that's what is normally referred to as the master pinion, and it was the one used to tighten the chuck to then grind the jaw tips for concentricity. If it does have that O mark then that's the pinion that should be used for the best concentricty when tightening the chuck each time.Some insist on using grease to lube a chuck, but it traps those metal chips inside. I've found even way oil to work well enough although you will get a bit of spray out of the chuck the first time it's run up to a higher speed. And pulling chucks apart for that cleaning and re-lubrication is a standard maintenance item at least every year or two or more often if you can feel the chuck starting to bind up with chips inside. Through drilling and boring parts is what causes most of the issue since centrifugal forces as the chucks spinning helps to drag those chips into the chucks internals.

Disassemble the tail stock completely and be sure to spotlessly clean it's Morse Taper bore, and if you wouldn't actually eat off the tooling your inserting into that bore it's not clean enough to be using it. A damaged tail stock bore is an expensive and very tough to properly fix problem that's easy to not have happen in the first place. Even free MT drills and tooling shanks with rust on them are far too expensive for any lathe I own. MT tool shanks and the female tapers they fit into are a high precision item. On a lathe tail stock without a draw bar, they can only hold due to there wedging effect and the high friction between both surfaces. Both of those depend on that high precision fit. Again lube the tail stocks internals and screw with either a light single weight non detergent motor or way oil. Then do the same to the top and cross slide. A clean and well lubed slide is far easier to accurately adjust and it will allow more repeatable settings to be made. For future reference, any discolored dark or black oil on a machine tool is that color because it's full of wear particles and contamination. If your oil is discolored your not using enough nor adding that lubrication often enough. Lubrication is the cheapest preventative maintenance you can do. Far more machines get worn out from poor or incorrect lubrication practices than ever get worn out from actually machining metal. And grease is almost never used despite what some might think on machine tools today for one very logical reason. It as I mentioned traps those cutting chips, dirt and wear contamination. Oil helps to most times flush that out. I see many on Youtube using either motorcycle chain lube or grease on there change gears. Compared to the gearing in any vehicle transmission, those lathe change gears on machines of this size see very low actual torque loads. A few drops of oil on each gear each time you use the machine is ample. Any oil is better than no oil, and I've tried in the past just about everything until I did finally try a proper way oil. It makes enough of a difference it's worth doing what you have to getting some. Mobil Vactra no. 2 is one I know that works well.

Grease is and does get used today on a large percentage of cnc machines. But there designed and well guarded to use that type of lubrication. And most of those use some type of built in timed auto lube system. Grease explained simply is made from oil with a carrier agent used to transmit it into the areas being greased. On machines not designed to use it, grease will greatly accelerate wear over regular light applications of oil. Second guessing my lathe manufacturer's lube recommendations cost me an $800 motor a number of years ago. Today I use exactly what they think is best and not what I do. :)

An extra tip. If your ever turning cast iron castings or steel with ANY exterior rust on it, then to start with, wire brush as much of that rust off away from your lathe first. Then cover the lathe ways, cross and top slides with clean cloths until you get the first pass made and the part surface is down to clean metal. The crust on castings is both extremely hard and full of casting sand, but rust is also a rudimentary form of iron carbides. Both of those are much harder than the metal that lathe is made of. That material can and will embed into the softer material of your slide surfaces. When it does and with the usual lube oil it will act exactly like a lap to vastly increase your wear rates. Covering your lead screw is also a good idea as well.

I would imagine after you've used that lathe for awhile you'll be back with more questions for leveling it and adjusting the tail stock so it's center line is true to the head stocks C/L. Both are important and both if incorrect result in unwanted part tapers. Before those questions, buy if you don't already have them a good 6" dial or digital caliper, a good 1" capacity micrometer with .0001" divisions, and a cheaper off shore magnetic base and 1" dial indicator with .001" divisions on the dial. Optional maybe, but I'd still recommend one, a .0001" reading lever type dial test indicator. Depending on how far you want to go and what you can afford? A level of at least this accuracy https://www.grizzly.com/products/grizzly-master-machinist-s-level-8-x-0005-per-10/h2682 might be non optional as well. How well and permanent any leveling adjustments are will be directly related to what your bench and floor surfaces are made from.

Pete
 

FernieFatTony

New Member
Thank you Pete. You hit the nail on the head. That is it. Thank you for all the info.

We are going to start with a thorough clean of chucks, tail stock, slides etc. Good to know about using oil. Would a 30w non-detergent be light enough or should I grab a 10w?

It is missing the toothed belt so I'll need to look to buy one of those, though perhaps the guy I bought it from will still have it. He has been bringing me extra things as he finds them and he may not even know the belt is for that.

I see already by searching the Emco model that there are a number of rebuild videos out there I'll have to take a look at.
 
For machine tool lubrication where the alloy materials used are an unknown, it's much safer to use a non detergent single grade of oil. While it's rare, high detergent motor oil can be a problem due to the additives used in these detergent oils since they can sometimes react with the brass and bronze alloys used as bushings etc throughout the machine tool. Unfortunately for us there's no way to tell in advance if it would be an issue or not. If you can find it then a 20W non detergent type should work fine. 30 W on a machine of this size might be a little heavy. I'm in a small SW B.C. town so most shop items sure aren't available. I still made a point of buying proper way oil because it does make a difference in how well the slides operate because of there oil additives designed to do exactly that. When I bought mine, Ebay etc was barely getting going. Today smaller amounts of way oil aren't hard to find. I had to order a 5 gallon drum of Vactra no. 2 way oil from the local bulk plant to get what I wanted. It's still worth it to me. A 20W motor oil will be fine for lubricating the tail stock quill, change gear bushings, lead and feed screws etc. And use the way oil if you can get it on the lathe bed, cross and top slide.Since I have an ample amount of way oil and the no. 2 grade is fairly light weight I pretty much use it for everything on my lathes and mills. For oil lubrication of something like a 3 jaw lathe chuck, grease would likely be better and even Bison uses a special type in there chucks. It still has that problem I mentioned about retaining metal chips and dust. Any oil inside the chuck is to me preferable to having to clean the chucks much more often. But that's a choice you'd have to make on what to use. I learned the hard way when using oil that you will get that oil spray the first time you spin the chuck up to a high rpm. Now after cleaning and re-oiling the chuck I use a open topped card board box sitting on the bed that's large enough to surround but not touch the chuck. Use that and run the chuck at high rpm for maybe 5 min. and you'll get very little spray after that.

Lol, careful about those rebuild videos, most will have good information but it's a slippery slope talking yourself into "I'll just making a few minor improvements". I've never owned the same lathe as you have so I don't know how closely they replicated the original Emco design. Your main issue is trusting any information you find out about for your particular lathe. Many changes were made over the years with these cloned lathes so nothing can be taken at face value unless it's double checked that it does agree with the parts and assembly of what yours has. Finding an online copy of the Emco compact 8 lathe manual should be fairly easy, and that might? be pretty close to what you have for the parts assembly on yours. When you do find one then compare the change gear threading information from the Emco manual to the gear change threading chart on your lathe. That will be a pretty good indicator of just how close it might be to the originals.

One of the most important bits of information to learn for me was a mention in one of my reference books about the Cartesian Coordinate System. Unless you already know of it, that's not optional to know and fully understand information. So if you don't know of it? Do a detailed Google search and spend some quality time until you do. It's formed the basis of the Industrial Revolution and is still used in every CNC and manual machine today. In a nut shell, it's like using a map to get to anywhere else. First you have to know your exact current location so you know where your starting from, and what direction to go to get to your target location. GPS works exactly the same. Point to point machining using coordinates either manual, cnc, imperial or metric is exactly the same.

Pete
 
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