New toy: Setting up Colchester Student lathe

[Jonathan]

My new lathe arrived yesterday, so I've spent much of today cleaning and setting it up:


I was impressed how effortlessly that crane picked up the lathe. Getting it up the garden was completely the opposite though (I'll post that in the thread I started earlier).

Here it is in place:


We still need to move the worktops into a more optimal location (big hammer!) and fix them down. The lathe is pretty stable as it is.

The bed of the lathe looks in good nick for the most part. In some places there's a tiny bit of discolouration - probably rust but I can't feel a bump or anything so I'm happy with that. There's a few small nicks in it near the tailstock end, again nothing major.

It's come with a 200mm Burned chuck. The mechanism is nice and smooth, but I cleaned it all out anyway. No chuck key, but it didn't take long to make one! There's no external jaws for it, but I can get 4" bar in without them anyway and I don't envisage needing more at all often. I can use the (free!) 10" 4 jaw chuck that came with it for bigger stuff. There's also 3 soft jaws.

Problem: The jaws on the 3 jaw seem to be worn such that it's holding bar at an angle to the axis of rotation of the spindle. When I tighten the chuck it looks like it grips the bar closer to the spindle first, then if you really tighten it the end of the jaw near the tailstock grabs. It looks like the jaws are tapered. :sad: I wondering if I should skim a bit off the jaws? 10mm from the chuck the runout is 0.22mm, 50mm away it's 0.44m, 30mm it's 0.32mm - so it looks pretty linear.

The headstock has sufficient oil in it for now - the gauge is half full, or half empty...However the threading gearbox appears to have no oil, so I need to find some. It says in the manual here, but I'm not sure where to get it:

http://bbssystem.com/manuals/colchester_student.pdf
(page 11)

The autofeeds both seem to work fine, if a bit slow.

There's a bit of backlash in the cross slide and compound slide, more in the former. That could be a problem... It does seem to vary, so maybe the screw is worn unevenly. The slide is a bit stiffer near the end where there seems to be less backlash. I'll investigate this tomorrow.

I swapped the wires in the motor to run it on 220v instead of 440v and wired up the 2.2Kw china VFD from the router with the relevant settings changed. It worked first time :surprised:. The main belts look a bit worn, I might replace them just to be safe.

It would be nice to put the coolant pump on the VFD. I've read that it's OK to have two motors on the same VFD and I'll be changing the spindle speed with the gears for the most part so I won't have an issue with the pump not going fast enough. I'm still not sure that it's wise? I'm right on the limit of the VFD as it is. The VFD is 3HP, and so is the lathe motor. If I put it at full tilt (50Hz with highest gear - apparently 1200rpm) the VFD reads about 6 amps (upto 10.5 on startup but not for long at all). I've got the spinup time set to 5 seconds.

More to follow as and when I think of it and find out.

In the meantime, can anyone advise me on the chuck, coolant pump and oil please?