Reply To: Hamilton 926 Tear Down

[chris mabbott]

@david pierce wrote:

Chris,
Eight out of ten leading experts agree that it is healthy to fondle your tool if it is big, heavy and shiny. Last weekend I wasted two days of my life trying to get three pictures up. There is some procedure that I have wrong and every time it looked like it was going to post, it would allow me to put up other pictures but not the three I wanted to send. I am going to have to wait for Bob or Tom to step me through the process in order to get it to work properly. I apparently left out a step and it will not work until I follow the entire procedure properly.
Tailstocks on WW lathes can be a problem. When the lathes were made at the factory, the tailstocks were custom fitted to each lathe. Unfortunately the people who sell them on Ebay part them out and it is difficult to get a headstock spindle and tailstock spindle to line up. The Wolf-Jahn Geneva lathes always seem to line up precisely if interchanged which is one of the reasons I like them, but they are one of the few lathes that were made with that degree of consistancy. Judging from NAWCC blogs the Horia lathes also have a problem in this area.
david

David, I’m somewhat comforted to hear that it is a completely normal practice to briskly polish ones tools and not a result of some deep, underlying trauma from my childhood 😆
I’ll also happily volunteer to trade a little photo posting knowledge in exchange for your machine skill, maybe we can do the deal in a dark alley while we swap paper bags full of these products 😆

OK seriously, I wasn’t aware that each lathe was produced as a set, I’d rather imagined a more mass produced system for some reason, even though I know they have matching serial #s
I wonder how they assured the fit of replacement parts & attachments etc..
I also wonder if there was some kind of serial number record to fabricate new parts for a certain range of lathes, keeping within the specs of any given range.

Has anyone ever seen photos of the plants, manufacturing process, old parts catalogs etc. It would be an interesting study..

Chris