Reconditioning a Relmac lathe

[irving2008]

So - todays plan was to get up to the point where I was ready to pour the bearing...

That mean preparing the spindle, locating it in the housing and sealing the bearing ends... so here's how I got on..

Firstly I needed to polish up the spindle on my improvised polishing jig (see post #5 above)

I used wet n dry, kept wet initially and grades down to 600 which is pretty fine. I wrapped the paper round an 8" length of 1/4" x 2" steel flat which made it an easy 2-handed operation.

Here's the before and after, after 30min or so of polishing...





I then turned my attention to the bearing housing and degreased that, wirebrushed it, and now it looks like...