Renovating a Hardinge HLV-H

[BillTodd]

Once in the garage, the first job was to get rid of the horrible off-white hand paint job...

Fortunately the lathe must have had a minor 'tart up' prior to the hand painting; The darker grey blow-over spray job has not stuck to the original Hardinge enamel very well , so I was able to simply scrape off the two layers in one simply operation.

I'm not sure what to do about painting it yet; I'd to spray it but my compressor's too small and the lathe is far too heavy to move to a spray shop - I'm thinking about rollering it on ???

[BillTodd]

I heard back from Axis_gb , Sony's Uk distributor for the lathe's magnescale DRO. They have a replacement switch overlay in stock for <£10 and will supply a manual for free :) Truly superb service :)



It's a testament to the robustness of the magnescale scales that they were still working (over the 2" or so that I could move them) while stuffed almost full of congealed coolant. There's no way a glass scale would have survived. I took them apart and scraped most of the stuff out, then cleaned them with safewash pcb cleaner (doesn't eat plastic, unlike some solvents) now they're working OK. (



More good news...

I had been disappointed to find that there were no change wheels or banjo behind the machine's gearbox cover (all the pictures I had seen of the HLV's had gears). Mick (the man on the forklift) spoke to one of the machinists at the firm I got the lathe from and he says they don't need change gears at all to cut English threads, the built in gear box works without them. :)