Meuser Lathe

afuege · Post by **afuege** » Fri Feb 06, 2009 9:24 pm

My Lodge & Shipley lathe suffered a catastrophic failure a few weeks back. Unfortunately, it was beyond reasonable efforts to repair and ended up at the local scrap yard (all 9500 lbs of it). I started looking around for something that was a bit smaller but that was well equipped. I must have looked at 10 lathes in the last few weeks, but was fortunate to have fallen upon this 15" Meuser:

Included with the lathe is a steady rest, a follow steady, collet closer, collets, spare cross-slide, spare compound screw, four jaw chuck, three jaw chuck, face plate and a taper attachment.

Since I was already there, I decided to snag this K&T 205 S-12 Horizontal Mill:

This is a late model machine. It came with a few spare spindles and a second outboard bearing. This mill has been fitted with optics and electronics to allow it to run a fully automated cycle.

I already have a Cincinnati horizontal, but the price on this machine was too good to pass up. I started cleaning her up today. I hope to have it fully functional in a few days.

This came out of a plant in NE PA that made pressure gauges. There are hundreds of machines available. A short list would include Lathes (Harding, Hendey, South Bend, Cincinatti, Warner Swasey and others I couldn't ID) Mills, (Cincinnati, Brown & Sharpe, Hardinge, Burke, Powermatic) Gear Hobbers, Screw Machines, Gang Drills (Mostly older Walker Turner) Tap Machines, Lot's of CNC lathes, Band Saws, Disc sanders, belt sanders, EDM's, Surface grinders, and tool & cutter grinders. There is also loads of tools and test gear. If anyone has interest in this, just e-mail me and I'll forward you the contact info for the seller. Things aren't really cheap, but prices are reasonable.

I'll be moving the lathe into the shop tomorrow. I'm hoping to get started on a jointer cutterhead project very soon.

-Arthur Fuege
Somerset, New Jersey

crzypete · Post by **crzypete** » Sat Feb 07, 2009 12:11 am

Arthur,
Nice scores.

The lathe is very nice, but I am not familiar with the make, German? Looks like it has a jacobs rubber flex lever collet chuck on it. Curious as to the spindle nose as well?

Now the mill, that is another story. Wow, that is a beast! And I can tell from here that it is going to clean up well.

I am very tempted to email you for a fix- I have been looking for a hardinge collet lathe with turret and lever compound, but also am trying not to buy machinery at the moment......

Thanks for sharing.

Pete

afuege · Post by **afuege** » Sat Jun 27, 2009 10:33 am

I managed to get my Meuser lathe trued up pretty good. It's running great and does just about everything I need. Between this lathe and the Kerry 1324 I have everything I need.

Right.

I got into another cutterhead project that required 5' between center. So what did I do? Introducing my Meuser's bigger younger brother:

This is a Meuser M0L made in 1960. It is a ball bearing machine. Cuts 162 threads, has a steady rest and a D1-6 chuck spindle mount.

The picture above was taken after I had needle scaled the paint off of the head. The entire machine is in South Jersey right now having the bedways, cross-slide and compund re-scraped. More on that process later.

I'm hoping to have the machine back in my shop later today or tomorrow. And then it's time for paint.

-Arthur

Toolslinger · Post by **Toolslinger** » Sat Jun 27, 2009 4:40 pm

afuege wrote: I got into another cutterhead project that required 5' between center.

Arthur, you're the only person I can imagine making that statement casually...

afuege · Post by **afuege** » Sat Jun 27, 2009 10:34 pm

I spent the better part of the today in South Jersey watching the scraping operation on my lathe bed. I just barely had enough time to get the lathe back into the barn before it got dark, so the pictures below may not be so great. I'll get some better ones up once I start the reassembly.

Here's a shot of the bedway:

Here's the mounting plate for the compound and the underside of the compund head:

Finally, here's the cross-slide and saddle:

-Arthur

nektai · Post by **nektai** » Sun Jun 28, 2009 7:44 am

Beautiful!

This lathe is going to be a work of art.

I would love to hear about the scraping process. Was it done by hand? How did you know it was time to have it done?

afuege · Post by **afuege** » Sun Jun 28, 2009 9:56 am

This lathe is equipped with automatic oilers on the apron, cross-slide and compund. It's all driven by a small cam-driven pump in the apron gearbox. When I went to see the lathe, it was apparent that the pump hadn't been functional for some time. The sight glass at the front of the apron was missing it's dome. If oil had been added to the resevoir, it would have sprayed out through the sight glass. I replaced the sight glass, but still couldn't get oil flow going. The only way to get at the pump was to remove the entire apron gearbox assembly. This meant removing the lead screw and drive shafts for the gearbox. Once I had the pump on the bench, I found that the only problem was a that the ball in the check valve was rusted. I cleaned the valve and installed a stainless ball and spring. Now I got good oil flow just cranking the handwheel on the bench.

The machine had apparently been run for many years with the faulty pump. The results of running it dry are clear in the photo below. This is the cross-slide after disassembly. There are some pretty good grooves. The gib was also bottomed out. You can see the oil pump in the apron gearbox at the lower right of the picture.

Here's the top of the cross-slide. The heavy wear is evident here as well:

As far as knowing when to get it re-scraped goes; Once I found that the gibs had been bottomed out and I still had some slop, I decided to start looking at having the ways ground and scraped. Of course, cost is a huge factor. Lathes are so cheap right now. If it was too costly, I would just grab the good parts and scrap the machine. I was really lucky in that the first scraper I called told me to bring the parts right over. He quoted me a very reasonable price and finished the job in a week.

All of the flattening and straightening was done by hand. It's a long process of blue, fit, scrape, repeat. The wave pattern on the bedway was done using a handheld power scraper. On the smaller parts, the pattern was done by hand. Watching and learning how this was done alone was worth the amount he charged me for the entire job.

-Arthur Fuege