Be Sure to Bend Over Backwards to Please Businesses You Patronize

I have been working on the lathe. Now that I’m a master machinist, I’m pretty comfortable out there, dismantling and greasing and oiling. It may be hard for a lay person to understand.

I contacted the seller–PBUH–about the useless thread selector knob, and my best guess from his response is that he plans to replace it. He is expressing impatience and a desire to get this over with. Imagine how much quicker it would have gone, had he sent me the right lathe and spent, oh, seven minutes inspecting it before shoving it out the door. But you can’t ask for the world.

Seriously, think about it. Until yesterday, I had no idea how this thing worked. But he’s upset because I haven’t taken it completely apart, checked every function, and discovered every single way in which he failed to live up to the bargain. Dude, I would have checked the power feed, thread indicator dial, thread selector lever, back gear, sliding gear shifter handle, and a ton of other things, IF I HAD HAD ANY IDEA HOW TO LOCATE AND OPERATE THEM. Maybe with your 9,000 years of experience, you could have taken a tiny fraction of the time it takes me, looked the lathe over, and fixed it up.

While I was waiting for this thing, he said something about how it was going to be cleaned and checked over. I am not sure how you can clean something and leave a thick layer of ostensibly undisturbed crud all over it, but some people have gifts I lack. Maybe he means he hit it with the leaf blower, Carl Spackler style. As for checking it, the nonfunctioning thread selector knob would appear to indicate that the check consisted of driving by and glancing at it through a car window.

This is the same guy who sent me three “new” micrometers which were completely petrified. He didn’t even open the box and give the thimbles a turn. Just FOOMP! Into the box and onto the pallet. NEXT!

If there’s one thing a customer loves, it’s a vendor who causes terrible problems and then complains that the customer hasn’t fixed them fast enough.

In brighter news, I haven’t found anything else that really scares me. I got up my nerve and opened the headstock up. The lid on that thing is machined cast iron, even though stamped steel would do fine. It probably weighs 12 pounds. I took it off and looked in there and saw…1974. That’s the year the lathe was made. I traveled back in time. If I had been wearing long pants, they would have instantly gotten three inches wider at the ankle.

The inside of the cast metal headstock was brown; I suppose they get that way before they leave the factory. I may be wrong; cast iron rusts really fast. But the steel parts–the gears and shafts and pinions–looked almost as if they had just been made. They glistened and winked above a pool of fragrant oil, as if they had no idea it was 2009.

So it looks like there is nothing wrong with the guts of the machine. Only those parts that have been subjected to the ignorance of prisoners are beaten up.

I had the speed set pretty slow, so I figured it was safe to turn it on and see if it had splash lubrication. It did. And it splashes real good, even at low speeds. I had to jump out of the way to avoid getting a nice stripe of oil down the front of my clothes. The biggest gear caught it and sprayed it vertically into the air.

I tried to lubricate the lathe. I got out my new grease gun and loaded it up and went to work. And it looks like I shot grease into two fittings intended for oil. Oh, well. Two of the big gears outside the headstock had fittings, and I misunderstood the manual, and there you go. I couldn’t get them apart to the point where I could scrape the grease out, so I left it in there. Hopefully the lathe won’t explode right away.

I oiled all the other bits as well as I could, and I used solvent to get the crusty grease off the ways and other moving parts. You wouldn’t believe the difference it makes. The grime the seller left on this thing as about as slippery as cold peanut butter mixed with molasses, so when I tried to move the tailstock, for example, it required a good shove. Now everything slides all happy-like. And some of the noise has disappeared. I’m starting to see how this could turn out to be a good machine instead of a nightmare.

I may have to take the carriage off. There’s a little clamp that fell off, and even though a simple bolt holds it on, it’s a bear to hold in place while you attach the bolt. I’d like to apologize to the seller for letting that clamp fall off! I’m so sorry I didn’t see that he left it loose, causing it to drop as the lathe was put in place in the garage. That was irresponsible of me.

I sure hope there were no problems with my money, which has been in his bank account for over three weeks. I sure hope it wasn’t the wrong size, and that it wasn’t defective.

This gives me more confidence about buying a mill. It shouldn’t. But it does. This only worked out by God’s grace, and I was an idiot for trusting this guy. But somehow it gives me hope that I’ll be able to get this stuff done.