Not exactly the busiest week in the shop. Managed to get a few things done however.I also am going to need to redo one of the items I worked on. It's the old proverbial two steps forward one step back. Oh well I have the time and it will give me better experience working on this lathe.
I decided that now that the tailstock was done I would finish the split nut that goes under the gearing section on the end of the leadscrew. Previously I had made the circular part and threaded it for use. However I could not bore the countersink and drill the holes for the nuts on the Van Norman mill you'll remember because I did not have a vise. I also could not cut the nut in half without this same vise. Well when I came home last week I stopped at KBC and bought a vise. A little sidebar here. I only wanted a 4" jaw vise which weighs in around 50lbs. I did not want the 6" because the physical vise is to large and it weighs 100lbs. They had two vises in the catalogue at reasonable prices. One was KBC branded the other was no name. Of course the no name was 100$ cheaper. The write up however was identical. So I asked the salesman what the difference was. He said the KBC was made in Taiwan the other in China. Well since I'm not in the business of making money I decided to go with the no name one. Big mistake. It will work, but I already see shortfalls with it and I've only used it 1 hour.
So with vise installed I mounted the split nut so that I could bore out the countersink and drill the holes for tapping the bottom half of the nut once separated. Once both sides were bored and drilled I began to setup for cutting the nut in half. I quickly realized that I could not use the vise and therefore fixtured it to the bed of the VN#10. With the head in horizontal mode and a thin cutting blade installed it was short work to slice the nut in half. Here are some pictures showing these steps as well as the finished product.

 Now to install the nut. First problem noticed the bolt heads were to high and hit the gearcase casting. So over to the drill press to bore the counter holes a little deeper. Still didn't work. One of the other reasons it did not work was when I took a close look at the original bolt they drilled the hole so that it was on the thread side of centre and mine ended up being on the away side of centre. So either make a new one or think outside the box. I decided to shorten the heads of the bolts so that they would clear. This is not the ideal solution so somewhere down the road I'll pick up some more 2" stock and make a new split nut and be a little more careful with the measurements. However for now it is bolted on and spins with no interference.

Once this was done spent a little time around the shop cleaning up and then decided to take the Headstock apart. Before I took it all apart I took two pictures for the before shots. Here they are. One thing to take away is that on the left of the second picture you can see a hole just to the right of the casting bracket and the left of the gear. This will be talked about later.

Next we removed the back gears. This was not to problematic and they came out fine after a little head scratching to remember which way the internal shaft came out. Once that was done next step was to remove the gear on the left side of the headstock which drives the "transmission gears" and then to remove the brass bearing covers. These brass covers were on tight. I had to go out and buy another tool to take them off. Once they were off, and one took a little more oomph than I wanted to use. I've decided that I will most likely have to make two new ones. One especially is damaged badly from previous owners and then me trying to remove it. Here's a picture of the damage.

 Once that was done I removed the four screws that hold the three step pulley to the headstock shaft. I don't have a picture of this but on the largest dia flat pulley section there is a cap screw you remove and then through the resultant hole you can access four screws. These have tapered ends that lock the three step pulley to the headstock. Once the four screws were removed I decided to remove the pin that locks or unlocks the pulleys when using the back gears. This pin can engage in two different spots on the three step pulley and has a small screw retaining it in place and a spring and ball bearing underneath the pin shaft that locks it either open or closed by detents. Unfortunately I forgot how tense that spring was and when the pin was pulled our she flew. Luckily I found the spring within a few minutes. The ball bearing is somewhere in the garage and I'm not crawling around to find it. We'll just find another ball bearing some where. I then tried to release the nut that holds the thrust ball bearings in place. In second picture of the headstock I talked about a hole. This hole is in a part that threads out or in from the three step pulley. This covers a three piece ball bearing system, two races and a ball bearing cage. By turning on this cover you either place more pressure on the bearings or by loosening you relax the pressure on the ball bearings. This is done to allow the headstock to rotate between the two main bearing housings without being to sloppy. Unfortunately I cannot at this stage unscrew this item. So at the moment it is sitting in varsol and hopefully later this week I'll be able to take it apart. At the opposite end is a fibre washer or at least that's what I assumed since that was the setup on my other lathe the #39. On this lathe the washer at the opposite end was metal. Here's a picture of this washer. There are marking on it but no real galling or grooving so it seems to have worked.

I then removed the two cast iron bearings from each end of the headstock and then gently tapped out the headstock shaft. Once it was all out a careful inspection shows very little damage to the headstock shaft and slight scoring to the cast iron bearings. But on the whole they are in good shape. I should be able to just hone out the cast iron bearing and possibly just clean up the shaft. Here are some pictures showing the upper and lower shaft and the cast iron bearings.

 Once we had the shaft out all the rest of the parts from the headstock came out relatively easily. This headstock is in very good shape, everything is very snug, not like my #39 which needed a lot of work to make the headstock usable again. This one should need just a thorough cleaning and then oiling up the parts before reassembly. One thing that I found interesting was that whatever oil that was used previously was quite thick and smelly. I would have assumed they would have used spindle oil on the entire headstock however most of the parts were covered with a relatively thick oil. Another interesting discovery was that under the second step pulley is a cavity that according to the blueprint should hold felt to keep oil in there. On this lathe the cavity was empty so no felt to absorb and hold the oil. Here is a picture of this as well as the blueprint picture for those who would like to see a drawing of the headstock.

Once everything had been taken apart some went in the varsol bath some went on the table awaiting the varsol bath. I'll leave you with a few shots of all the pieces spread out.

Well over the next week I hope to get a chance to slowly work on cleaning the bits and pieces as well as painting those parts that need it. 

Well for those of you from the Commonwealth that take time to reflect on November 11th I hope you have good weather on Monday. May your thoughts go out to those that gave up their lives so that we can live in relative freedom. 

Harold