Thread: The Deckel has landed

Originally Posted by .RC.

Trouble with rumours is that they are notoriously unreliable... I also heard the same rumour that there is one close by to me here, but that it is pink in colour and only the manliest of men would be able to handle such a manly colour...

Excellent, A lathe that lesser men tremble at using! Any less pink would have been quite unsuitable. I'll send a truck down to pick it up tomorrow!

Cheers

The Beryl Bloke

Originally Posted by Theberylbloke

Attachment 282050

Above is what happens when poor attitudes meets excellent engineering.

The above part sits on the main drive shaft with the chain running down to the feeds gearbox, behind it sits the pulleys for drive from the motor and in front of it sits a bearing embedded in the back of the column casting. The top surface in the photo is what sits against the bearing. You can see the layout more clearly on some of the recent photos Josh has posted.

Notice the very nice curve on the face. Very pretty. Expensively pretty in fact. However, that face sits against the inner race of a bearing that supports the rear of the main drive shaft going into the gear box. Inner bearing races are flat on the ends as a general rule. So this sleeve should have a nice square shoulder on it. I contacted Josh who confirmed that their machine has a nice square shoulder. Both the sleeve and the bearing inner race should turn together with no movement between them. The sleeve can only develop this nice expensive curve from wearing against the bearing inner race. A spinning shaft and a stationary inner bear race are not a good combination as it implies the bearing has seized. This combination will end in tears. Either shaft wears in the inner race or the outer bearing race will turn in the column casting. If you are really lucky you get both!

Preliminary investigations show about 5mm of end play and about .5mm of axial play. If I turn the shaft by hand, sometimes the inner bearing will turn and sometimes not. Guess I got really lucky! Not.

Not sure what has caused the failure, although lack of proper maintenance comes to mind. A bit of good old aussie "she'll be right" attitude perhaps??

Now I'm no expert on machinery (I might be when I finish fixing the Deckel, at this rate), I didn't check it out before I bought it and even if I had, I doubt I would have picked this up. The machine was disconnected from power and the belts would have been taking up play in the shaft.

Moving forward, this means I'll be taking the column off the bed and stripping out the gearbox to allow machining of the bearing bore. Thus the DRO is off the machine as a start. I am fortunate in that we used to have two machine shops in the area, one hit a financial rough spot and went under. The other got bigger, built a larger building, bought several CNC machines and now has about 10 employees. The young bloke who owns the shop is happy to have a go at boring out the damaged casting and confident he'll get it right.

The one advantage to such a serious strip down is that it should uncover any other faults in the machine.

It will have to wait a bit as I need to get some more roofing and walls on the shed along with some bench space to carry out the tear down.

Cheers

The Beryl Bloke

I still think you need to pull the shaft, it maybe just a toasted bearing, I found that there is a path for swarth to get into the gearbox if the covers and wipers are not fitted and there is no way to get it out without washing out the gear box, maybe some swarth has gotten into the bearing? but it would be also a good idea to check out the gears, especially since you are getting axial play, My head hurts even thinking about trying to find/make a replacement gear.

Even without taking out the shaft, you would be able to get an idea by taking off the rear bearing cap.

-Josh