Barn or garage find

[Toolmaker51]

! Not all mashing is obliteration; with feeler gauges in play it's precision mashing.
Used to send parts out for rotary swaging, result was a tapered 4130 tubing control rod. Before machining end fittings they needed minor straightening. This controlled center to center distance in the fixture and installation, and deflection in use.
By hanging a DI between the Vee blocks, monitoring progress in manual hydraulic 30t press was easily determined. They were just under 30'' long, tolerance was +/- .003, at mid-point.
Rotary Swaging, interesting process; couldn't find a decent, short representative video.
Solid bar, tubing, it doesn't care. A rather elliptical spinning barrel imparts hammering motion on die set of 2 or 4 individual halves. Cavity is machined to contour desired. They make motorcycle mufflers, control rods for semi-tractor door locks, all kinds of aircraft parts, very efficiently.

[C-Bag]

Precision mashing......LOL!

Rotary swaging sounds very interesting. There are so many things that stick in my brain that cause me wonder, how DO they do dat?
There was a long thread of a guy on like the welding web or one of those sites where he was trying to make a swage or die to expand or contract electrical conduit for making a light weight chicken coop. Personally I LOVE making stuff out of conduit, but have pondered how do they make those slide fits in the bigger tubing that like the frames on those car shelter tents and whether it would be possible to make something that would work on like 3/4" conduit. I have some ideas but it's too far down the to do list to get traction.

When you talk about straightening the gib I picture something like those multi roller arrays that they straighten like brake lines and tubing. Problem with the gib was it had very small humps from I think being jammed and buckling the gib. The precision mashing actually worked really good once I got the technique. Weird how it wasn't so much the thickness of the gauges, it was how close to the masher that made the most difference. I loved too that I finally got to bring my new to me ancient Brown & Sharpe 6" tool makers knife edge straight edge to bare upon the precision mashing process. I love it when I can show my SO that my rampant TAS( tool acquisition syndrome) actually has use .

[Toolmaker51]

Powered swaging leaves a fully formed reduction, as lathes would more or less, but displaced material lengthens the part in a predictable manner. A rotary swage, foundation and compliant guarding is a decent capital investment.
Shelters and like products, especially aluminum tubing, is compressed by a similar but stationary die. The excess is further depressed into the axial wrinkle of the smaller portion. A instantaneous process, quiet and less labor intensive overall.

Roller straighteners are common, for flat or wire stock in punch presses, along with feeders, for material supplied by spools. The work described was identical to what you did, except the gib is a flat profile.

And TAS has a cure...better described as intervention.
Let SO work one of those operations. If there is a spark of creativity, problem solved.

[Frank S]

C-bag since the od La blond has already been defiled to an extent, that plus the fact that I don't have any interesting history facts to tie to it any mods to It is don't feel would be detrimental. Becides I would most likely retain the La blond head just in case it might be wanted if I were to sell the lathe.
I currently would have to make several tools before starting a project such as making a gear head. I have been making some drawings for one but in doing so it has started me thinking about a constant variable drive instead. but for now at least the old lathe is in running order and it is not as though i really need another project at this time.
I am more inclined to get the American mill positioned in my chop van and set it up since my other mil is an Enco 4 inch column bench mill

[C-Bag]

You know Frank there is something truly liberating in not getting a perfectly restored Old Iron machine tool. It's great to get those "good bones" and use that as the basis to continue its life being what it was meant to do, do work.

I waded through a lot of opinions good and mostly bad about what was available locally. Used Tiwanese/Chinese. I needed a lathe and a mill, but was not going to need to do production work or really large work and moderately precision. I also couldn't justify the 3-5x cost for American machines when I really got down to what I thought I needed. Size was also a major concern.

Being a noob at all of this was extremely daunting. But because the research took so long for what I wanted to do then compare what came up for sale on CL I was able to get a 9x20 wth a ton of tooling and an Enco RF-30 w/some tooling and heavy table for just a little over $1k. They both needed work to function better but could do what I wanted as was and as I got better I could tell what needed fixing on them. But like you describe I also need to make other tools, fixtures and in my case add to my education to tackle the next evolution.

It's been quite a growth process to understand how the lathe, mill and now the shaper along with the other tools contribute to the repair, maintenance and expansion of function of the whole shop. All this has been greatly helped by wading through Machine Tool Recondtioning by Connolly.

I'm intrigued by your reference to "constant variable drive". I understand that for general machinery, but don't know enough to know what that means for your application. Is this instead of gears for threading?

[Frank S]

C-bag the variable drive would only controll th spindle speed in in stead of a selection of gears or a transmission if you will or in the case of old iron that had 3 or 4 different sized flat belt pulleys and a single deep reduction back gear this gave either a total of 6 or 8 possible spindle speeds the change gears or feed rate gears to control the carriage are not effected by spindle speeds since they are directly connected to the main spindle the rete of feed remains constant regardless of turning RPM

[C-Bag]

Ah, makes sense. You are always working on another plane as far as size and hp involved. Another of my planned upgrades to the 9x20 is the heavy duty 3hp treadmill DC motor and controller I picked up.

In your case don't you only need a big 3ph motor and VFD?

[Frank S]

That would be one of my thoughts. I had a Van Norman Truck brake lathe set up that way it was a 10 Hp brake lathe you could chuck the hub and drum with the duels still mounted about 20 minutes and it was good to go back on the truck trailer or buss. really saved a lot of time

[C-Bag]

Holy cow, I can't even fathom that! Or what a rig like that would look like.

[Frank S]

I decided to contact Leblond at LeBlond Ltd. - LeBlond and Standard Modern lathes, K.O. Lee, Johnson Press, Deka Drill and W.F. & John Barnes products. to get a handle on just how old the lathe is.
In less than 2 hours after I sent them an email John sent me a reply. it seams that there is very little info any machine made by Leblond prior to sometime in 1931. All he had was that the machine was shipped in 1918 also that machines of that size and vintage would have been able to pull 1 to 1.5 HP from the overhead shaft drive system, This was largely dependent on how much actual power a 2" flat belt could deliver. He further acknowledged that since the spindle had been converted to a timing belt drive and now has taper bearings instead of the lead Babbitt spindle bearings that it could probably handle a 2 to 3 HP electric motor the only issue might be when using the low speed back gear or the condition of the gear train for the feed, which makes perfect sense to me with the 100 year old cast Iron gears
I have a 2 HP 3ph motor that I might use if I decide to do any mods or upgrades, but on the other hand since I don't need it to be used as a HOG lathe the 1 hp 120v motor does have merits