Lathe Repairs needed
Whilst I was making the lathe cover, I decided to take a look at the drive belt and pulley’s to see if I could ascertain why it was making a lot of noise when running.
As you can see from the video, there is a lot of wobble in the pulley that is fitted to the motor. When I loosened the 2 allen key bolts at the front and removed the belt, I feel the pulley wobbling on the spindle quite easily.
Running the motor without the pulley produced no vibrations and was practically silent.
As you can see from the picture, the pulley has an inner steel shim. Perhaps this is part of the original design to stop the motor from stalling? There is also a key on the motor shaft that fits into a groove on this shim.
There is also a grub screw (possibly added later) that can tighten the pulley onto the shaft.
There have been a few suggestions such as 3D printing a temporary replacement to allow machining to be done and casting a whole new pulley set and machining that.
But I think I can run the lathe (with the cover on of course) and machine a new bush to push-fit into the pulley in place of the steel piece. That just leaves the challenge of getting that out without damaging the pulley.
I did a bit of google searching for replacements and RDGTools seem to do something very similar. RDG Tools – Small 3 step pulley drive so that could be a suitable replacement if I have problems with this bush approach.
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
