Reconditioning a Relmac lathe

[irving2008]

Now it was time to do trial fit of everything. I planned to locate the spindle using a MT3 taper and the tailstock in which I placed an MT1-JT6 arbor that was already centre-drilled. This worked well...



The clingfilm is just to keep everything clean until I'm ready..

A quick DTI of the spindle showed 0.005mm runout which is fine!

I then experimented with shimming for the pinch-bolt. I've decided that I should shim it with about 30thou then the bearing will be tight enough to allow the pinchbolt to compensate for wear over a wide range. Not having shims to hand I found that 9 folds of heavy-duty roasting foil from the kitchen gave 32thou so I used that. Here you can see it being trialled...




Now we are ready to prepare for pouring the bearing.

Firstly, coat the journal in soot... this is, apparently, one of several ways of preventing the hot metal sticking to the steel shaft and making it easier to remove - we'll see later if that is true :) A candle provides the soot...