lathe repairs.

[toglhot]

Not that long ago, my 10 year old lathe needed new switchgear, as all the plastic fell apart. It had a latching on/off switch which was wired through a safety switch on the chuck guard and a rotary switch for forward/reverse.

I rang around to a few industrial ectrician shops who specialised in machinery, but they woudn't help as I didn't have any schematics, so, with no choice I had to do it myself. Rather than trying to get replacement switches, I opted to replace the switchgear with generic type switches. I pulled the back off the electrical housing and there were cables everywhere, the rotary switch by far the worst, something like a dozen and a half connections +++, simply too complex to understand, so I replaced that with a simple two position toggle switch, the on/off latching switch with a non latching switch and by passed the chuck guard safety switch.

I connected a multimeter to the motor wiring to sort out the windings, identified the start and run windings and went from there, drawing up a schematic to include the toggle switch for forward/reverse and the simple on/off switch. I had to also replace the capacitor storage box as that was starting to crack, made a bracket for it, made a faceplate for the switchgear and put it all back together and then tackled the wiring. Once done, I switched on and lo and behold it all worked.

While I was at it, I gave the lathe a birthday party, stripped it down, cleaned and inspected everything and put it back together.