Very pretty! I've had nothing but great results with Bison chucks. I currently own a Bison 5" 3 jaw plain back that holds 0.0005" concentricity on all diameters. And no coning to speak of. And I have a 6 jaw just like yours, simply an awesome chuck. A while back I purchased an Emco Super 11, and it came with a USA made Buck 6 jaw set-true (one piece jaws), and that is a honey of a chuck. Lighter and a more delicate touch than the Bison, I use it for small parts - it will clamp down to 4mm. BTW, I never really bonded with the Super 11 and a friend owns it now. The spindle features on your lathe are running very true. I do that kind of check, but I also do another kind of measurement that shows the errors of motion of the spindle. I use a 1" G5 ball on a XY mount that I gage against. The ball is mounted to a circular dovetail base that is in a cup on a 1/2" mandrel. The ball can be translated by 100 TPI instrument push-push screws. I gage the ball surface with a Pretec (Alina) LVDT gage. For a somewhat rougher on the road check I use my Mahr Supramess 20 millionth indicator. With the ball mount chucked into whatever work holder I then XY translate it until I get the lowest average runout. I then record the excursions for a few revolutions and plot them. I do a circular (elliptical) fit and subtraction as that is always something that can be adjusted out. The residue is the deviation from perfection of the "axis" of rotation. The errors come from small variations in the size and shape of the bearing balls, the geometry of the bearing races, etc. I do this for as close to the spindle as I can get, and then several inches out. The axis generally sweeps out a complicated "cone" in space. It usually repeats not every revolution but something like every 1.6. This is due to the ratio of the inner and outer race diameters and if there is an errant ball rolling around. Doing this check at two planes let you find the "focus " of the sweep, and you can usually make a good guess at what is going on with your spindle bearings. I expect you'll find very little error in your spindle motion. Whatever you do have, you'll find that a test plug cut will show about one half of that magnitude in out of roundness. I use an air bearing for doing the roundness check. I'm always searching for my next ex-lathe. Weiler lathes are very interesting but, alas, practically non-existent in North America. It seems to me Weiler nailed the intermediate manual lathe - the 600-800 Kg class. In the pre-you know years, 2018/2019, I seriously considered taking a trip to Germany to purchase a Weiler and get it shipped over. Or, try to find an agent to do the deed. I might still do one or the other.
The Emco super 11 has appeared on my radar after seeing it on Stefan Gotteswinter's channel, but it dissapeared quickly because it was a bit to small for me. Basically it was like my previous Wabeco from a size perspective. Regarding your measuring instructions, I can't say I fully understand yet how I can measure it, you obviously know more than I do about this topic. I will take more time when I am in front of the lathe to digest it. Or if you have a video of someone doing that, I would be grateful. Regarding the Weiler lathes, I really love them, for me it bridged the gap between manual and CNC. None of these was right for my wants and needs and I did not had space or money for two separate machines. They are not cheap here too, I've found a few during the years, but you can monitor sites like surplex.com, machineseeker.com, troostwijck.com. I've found my lathe on the last one. Wasn't quite cheap, because it overlaps the hobbyist market with a garage space. My friend that I am talking in the video, got an E50 in waaaay much better condition than mine, and excepting the controller he was able to keep everything in terms of motors and drives. For my machine I had to do a bed regrind. For his machine the bed is like new. No scratches or dints, basically no wear at all and he got the machine for 3k eur. However, his machine is much bigger, and it would have never fitted in a garage. Hope you find one there too, not sure how much the shipping would be. The cheapest Weiler E30 that I saw after I bought mine, was 2500 eur, same year, aprox the same visual condition as mine was when I bought it. My machine weighs about 900kg. If you are taking it to US you will need to change the motors anyway so it won't be a problem that it needs 400v 3phase.
The Super 11 popped up locally on Craigslist - just 60 miles away and it looked good. I was the first caller and was over there later that day - up in the mountains of central California. It was an old fellow - Axel - who was closing out his movie camera repair business. I basically bought him out. Axel and his wife Erika had immigrated to the US back in the 80's and built a little bit of Bavaria heaven up there, lived their dream, and were moving to a easier situation. The Emco was in wonderful condition, obviously not much used. But it just wasn't the machine I wanted. I got a lot of nice things from Axel, most of it I still have and use. I'll describe the ball check again in a different way. Imagine you have a ground pin, and it is perfectly round. You chuck that into a 4 jaw independent chuck and commence to center it. You will find that, no matter how you try, there will be a level of runout that you can't remove, even though the pin is perfect. The runout you are seeing is caused by the intrinsic motion error of the spindle. I use a ball instead of a pin as a good ball is easy and cheap to buy. I bought 10 1" G5 balls for $12! I thought I was going to have to improve them (my background is precision optics fabrication) but after checking them on my ~2 microinch roundness checker I found them to actually be G5 quality. Amazing really. I mounted the ball to a pad that forms a positive circular dovetail, so when screws push against it the flat bottom of the pad is pressed into the screw cup. This affair is attached to a 1/2" diameter pin that I can put into a collet or a jaw chuck. The screws are a standard type of precision adjustment screw made for jigs and set-ups. Look at Thorlabs: www.thorlabs.com/thorproduct.cfm?partnumber=F6MSS10 I get them with the threaded bushings and bond the bushing into the hole. I usually use an LVDT electronic gage for the measurement. This lever head gage is sensitive to a couple microinches, and has very low hysteresis. But it's bulky and finicky. I recently acquire a used Mahr Surpramess 1/2 micron gage. Very good sensitivity and repeatability for a manual gage. For ordinary spindles it's more than good enough. If you plot all of the readings you can do some simple statistical analysis. The first thing to do is detrend the data for circular/centering misalignment. Making ever finer centering adjustments becomes futile when you are getting down to the level of the motion errors, so it's best to just subtract them mathematically. Basically, a circular function fit and subtraction. You can then find the standard deviation, RMS, and PV of the detrended data. This is all kind of academic, but you did say you chase microns... I used to have to do this because I was chasing nanometers. Spindles and slides on diamond turning machines have extremely high requirements (~ one microinch), and keeping the machines tuned meant being able to check these things. I left all that in 2016 when I retired. But I started a business that required some normal machining. I acquired a low hours Cadillac lathe (Mori Seki pattern) to make some big rings. It did that fine, but I noticed on very fine cuts the curl pulsed - it was intermittent. That motivated me to make the ball jig and investigate the spindle. I found at the spindle nose 2.5 microns peak to valley motion, RMS about 0.5 um RMS. Not bad really. But at 12 inches out the error was 13 microns PV! The geometry pointed right at the left hand bearing. The motion described a full cone in 1.58 rotations of the spindle, exactly how long it took for the balls to make one rotation in the bearing. There was one oversize ball in that otherwise fine bearing. Instead of doing the manly thing and rebuilding the spindle, I sold the lathe to a guy that didn't care much about precision while fixing his construction equipment. Since then I've checked every spindle that has gotten near me. It's a hobby now. My new to me really old Frankin (made from multiple machines) Logan 14 is a pretty decent example. The PV at the spindle and 5" out is a micron, and the RMS is 0.2 um. Not bad at all and it cuts a pretty smooth and round part. I use 2011 aluminum for round test pieces. 6061 extruded bar sometimes has a weakness that prints into the roundness. i sometimes think about going on a crawl for the perfect manual lathe. Not too big, not too small. Quiet, more precise than necessary, perfect feel. I learned on a Monarch EE, kind of hard to beat that but the work volume is tiny and it weighs 1600Kg. I dream there is a Weiler LZ or something in my future. Money isn't much concern to me now, I'm happy to pay for a low hours machine Thanks very much for the thoughtful reply, and for the links. It's episodes like this that make me think I need to figure out how to and make a YT video. @@LikeFactoryMade
@@randydewees7338 If you have any specific models Weiler LZ in mind, let me know. I might include it in my routine search on these sites. I often "relax" by checking what's new on the auction sites. That;s how I found mine, that's how I found the Weiler E50 for my friend. If you want a quiet toolroom lathe and you just want a manual machine, I think Hembrug DR1 is an awesome machine. I saw one in person, and I can say its the most quiet lathe I've ever saw. At 3000 rpm, you could only hear the wind. Usually they are not very expensive on auction sites here, and I see at least 2 interesting listings/year. Here is one: www.machineseeker.ro/hembrug-dr+1/i-13003955 The downside for these is that the spindle bore is quite small, 25mm if I remember correctly. But other than that, the machine is a beast. In Europe Hembrug means hard turning. I see you are very experienced, as my lathe's bed was reground, the headstock was removed when doing the grinding, and unfortunately, it sits on the V ways. From the factory there was a metallic epoxy between the headstock and the bed, that fell off when it was dismantled. Not sure how they have assembled it back but its not with the V ways, so I will have to dismantle it, rescrape the bottom of it and align it properly. If you think you can help with some advice on this, please tell me your email, or email me at the email in the channel's details section.
Both indicators are metric. The first indicator used to measure the chuck spindle taper runout is 0.001mm/div (0.0394) and the other one is 0.01mm/div (0.394 thousand of an inch). Yes, could tweak this further, but I’ve found it quite annoying that the set screws are not 90deg apart from another. It seems they didn’t had enough room.