Thread: What can I do about the noises in my head?

Michael,

I presently have the vertical head apart on on my Rossi universal. It was reasonably quiet when test run; but this machine has suffered severe operator neglect. The head has been apart before and "doctored up" by some previous butcher. Everything bar the bearings and gears was smothered in heavy grease. Original roller bearings were still in the spindle, but had been replaced on the input pinion shaft. These are annular contacts and the bevel gear end had blue balls (no, not from cold) and the wear was so great that it fell apart. The ball spacer was also cracked in 2 places. Obviously run dry and hot for a long time. The large roller bearings on the spindle are rugged enough to have survived for the time being.
The hardened drive gears from the horizontal spindle have only had about 85% width contact and due to lack of lube are worn. Cast into the rear housing above these gears is a reservoir with about a 5mm tube to guide the lube to the gears. Must have used very thick oil to slowly drip. No sign of a wick.

After a cleanup I finally located the lube point for this shaft under a heap of hard crud. This machine has ball oilers on on lube points not fed by the 2 1 shot oilers. It seems to me that the pinion shaft is generously oiled via its oiler with total loss of excess and the spindle is oiled via ball oiler on the top roller and the excess finds its way down to the bevel gears then to the bottom roller. Excess then flows over an annular ring/seal and out through a drain hole which had been blocked with a lump of acetal??.

Short answer is that with all this neglect/wear/damage and lack of lube there had to be a reduction in finish quality. I have found in this case I cannot rely on any prior care or repair and have had to strip the machine and rebuild from a kit. I would strip the head and check to make sure everything is correct and lubed. It may be that in your case you still have the original spindle bearings (most likely roller as your vertical is almost identical to mine) and they have a small amount of wear and require adjustment to the preload.

Ken

Hi Michael,
I have noises in my head too......the doctors say to ignore them.

As for Mlle, I replaced every bearing bar the 2 spindle bearings. As mine are all in oil baths they were not too bad, but still had scored races and some rust, presumably from sitting around for so long unused. The head is certainly noisier than using the machine horizontally, especially at higher speeds. I think however a fair bit of the noise comes from the slop in the drive from the horizontal spindle nose. Do you have to put the drive gear in the taper or is there just a pair of drive lugs like mine?
I'd call my gears 7 or 8/10, they only appear to have a bit of wear.

Cheers,
Ew

Quite a few years ago I bought a Suzuki Swift that used to crunch second gear when it was cold, drove me carzy, er crazy....

I bought some "Slick 50" gearbox treatment, which is a teflon lubricant for the gearbox. Two weeks or so later the crunching had disappeared and was still gone 100,000km later when the ex and I split up and she drove off with it.

I miss that little car.

I don't know if Slick 50 is still available and would only suit an oil filled head. There is also quite a bit of debate over the effectiveness of such products.



Cheers

The Beryl Bloke

Maybe check the float in the spindle first.
If the bearings are worn you could excessive end float.
Noise would be worn gears and hopefully not bearings.

Attached are a parts list and a cross section for the vertical head that came fitted to my Sajo UF52
V head section (Large).jpg Parts list (Large).jpg

I'm posting this here because I can't find any information on this machine's vertical head anywhere else on the web and one day someone else may want to know what is in there...
The drawing is mainly complete but doesn't have some of the tricks for getting it apart (heh, heh, heh...)

However, for those of a technical mindset, what should the lubrication be? It came packed with grease but as the ways had been greased instead of oiled, that is no great indicator. The left section has a drain plug so I think is oil bath (at least for the gears). For the lower shaft (item 22) the bearings are deep groove, so could be sealed. The upper shaft (item 30) is running angular contacts so they would be open. In the middle of item 28 at the top is a hole leading in from an annulus and there is an oil nipple feeding the outside but as the bearings are not sealed, the oil would flow either left or right. Flowing left is not a problem but flowing right leads into the vertical head and that is only labyrinth seals. The trouble with non-sealed systems is that there is not usually a good way to determine whether there is oil where it should be - they rely a lot on oil flowing and at the end of the day are messy.
So the questions are -

• Oil or grease (and in which part)? The horizontal spindle bearings are greased according to the manual but everything else (eg gearboxes) is oil splash.
• Should I consider better sealing? For example, items 11 and 12 are a simple labyrinth seal but a new item 11 could probably be made up that ran an oil seal against the spindle shaft
• Similarly, if items 6 and 7 were able to hold the oil up in the gear cavity, I could pack the bearings in the vertical head with grease and use oil for the bevel gears. Is a split system worth having?
• Is a felt seal (item 24) going to be good enough (0.3mm radial clearance) or should I try and find a more modern version? (bearing in mind that the modern versions need some lubrication to function - if no oil wicks through then the seal can be damaged.
• If I fitted pre-greased bearings on the lower shaft (item 22) would it matter if oil was flying around (would it tend to wash out the grease?) How good is the splash effect in a head like this anyway? Will the oil do the gears but not be reliable enough for bearings? (speed range is something like 40 to 1800 rpm)
• If I used grease on the gears will it stay on at 1800rpm?

Michael

Found this info on the net.



Other machines similar to this I've operated have had greased heads that cope ok up to 1500 rpm.
By the looks of the design of your head it seems it would be a greased head.

I'm certainly no expert but i would try to seal it up and go with oil. The Vernier is nearly identical except it has the 3rd section to allow the head to nod.

Where the drive comes in it is only a labyrinth, the oil bath in this section is only deep enough for the gear and the very bottom of the bearings to sit in. The problem i have is the center section of the head is leaking into this section and coming out the labyrinth. The head itself has a bath that soaks the main bearing, and the bottom of the bevel gear and bearing. The top bearing (it has 2 opposing tapered rollers) is oiled via an oil nipple once a day.

Cheers,
Ew

Those photos summarise the problem beautifully.
The manual I have does have the duo-mill on it (top two photos) and the spindle bearings are greased. (Sajo manuals look to bundle all models of the same size in the same document). The horizontal spindle bearings are also greased. However, the plate for the UF54 (next model up from mine) does not mention grease but talks of oil. I'm hoping to speak to some bearing/ tribology experts today and see what they come up with. While I would like to run oil I have no great hopes that it will stay in there as even the grease leaks out of the labyrinth seals. Perhaps a thick grease would not and it would also seal things up so oil would not run out?

Michael

Michael,

Does it matter that the oil runs out? In my deleted earlier reply I had said that the 13 has oiled opposed tapered roller bearings supporting the spindle, similar to Ewan's Vernier. There are labyrinth seals top and bottom. I pump oil in each time I use the mill. There is usually a small puddle on the table the next day. I use that oil to wipe down the table and the other bright bits on the mill.

When Clubman posted the photos I thought you had your answer. Wonder why the Swedes changed their minds?

BT

Originally Posted by Anorak Bob

I pump oil in each time I use the mill. There is usually a small puddle on the table the next day. I use that oil to wipe down the table and the other bright bits on the mill.

I wouldn't mind a drop or two but I would estimate that the cavity over the spindle would hold around 1/2 a cup or so of oil (maybe more) if the gear teeth were properly immersed. I don't want a puddle like that on the mill table. I also wonder how quickly the oil will run out on me - as well as how long the top cylindrical roller bearing is good for before needing re oiling, I'd like to know that if I don't use the mill for a week or two that all that I need is a pump from the oil gun and I am good to go. I guess if I did go that way I could make up a special cup that would allow me to replace the dripped out oil into the head (although I realise that this is not the best of practice).

I spoke to my bearing guys at Gardner Bearings today and they said that if bearings are open then they are meant to be oil lubrication. The way it is sounding certainly the LHS is looking oil. It's the RHS that I worry about. I have work's OEM bearing guy chasing this one for me too - a copy of the drawing has gone off and hopefully I can get some bearing/ lube advice from a specialist in the field. I guess I'm being cautious here because I don't want to have strip the head down on the possibility of wrong lube. Given that both the bevel and spur gears have a helix angle to them, the head should be smooth as anything when running if I have all the preloading right.

Michael

On the Rossi there is an oiler feeding the 2 angular contact bearings on the input shaft. (Was previously "greased" with the grease not in contact with the rollers any more and running dry. One bearing was blue.) The oiler was hidden under a pile of crud.
The vertical spindle has opposed tapered roller bearings top and bottom. They had also been greased and most of the grease had been flung out of contact. There are steel labyrinth seals top and bottom. There is an oiler that feeds the top roller which then appears to drip down and fill a small reservoir around the bottom bearing. There is a small hole to allow drainage for overfill. The gears are behind a gasketed nameplate. I can see no other way of lubricating these than grease. I chose to use "Tac2" spray solid oil on all the case hardened helical bevel gears on the feeds and vertical spindle as most are almost impossible to reach.
Right or wrong it is done; some lube is better than no lube and there is NO documentation whatsoever for the Rossi.

Ken

Watch the greases used in gearboxes as they are engineered not to remain still/ stiff but turn to oil / liquid under the action of the gears and heat. these are not axle greases / plain bearing greases a bearing place will have you sticking bearing grease in , not the correct lubricant at all guys Bruce

Started putting the head back together again today. Did the LHS and found a couple of interesting things.
When I took the gears out in the LHS that transfer the power I initially thought that the lower one was made of something non metallic as it did not have the same shine as the upper one did. As you can see from the photo that I took just before reassembly it is steel but for some reason the upper gear was treated in an inert atmosphere but the lower one had some air creep in - it's that beautiful blue shade. I initially though that it might have over heated in the machine but the bright teeth and pattern from the gear that was in the stack above it suggest it was not.
P1010977 (Medium).JPG
The other thing I noticed (that I wasn't so impressed with) was the dogs on the horizontal spindle. I'm not sure what this machine has been up to, as the one on the right of the photo looks to have been whittled from a lump of MS rather than the hardened and ground version on the other side of the spindle (and on the vertical spindle too). The screws were cheese head (as befits the weird nature of the machine, those on the horizontal spindle were metric, those on the vertical head BSW) except for one that was clearly a ring in as it was a domed head.
P1010979 (Medium).JPG
I think I have a small piece of W1 that might suit so when the mill is back together I will make up a replacement, H/T and then linish for fit. (I saw a $500 Kent surface grinder on gumtree a couple of weeks back. Missed it due to indecision - would have been perfect for this sort of thing). What is the consensus for a part like this? Leave it hard or temper it back? (to what?)

Michael

My Lugs are all made from whittled cheese Michael, not original i'm sure. Luckily for me mine are all M6, but i have to remove the horizontal ones to put the vertical head one. Poor design there if you ask me. I've never really thought about replacements, but i guess they should be decent steel and hard, although i think you would want them softer than the tooling, they are easy to replace but damaged tooling not so much.

Ew