I have wanted a lathe forever. Never had enough of a need to buy what I really wanted so I have always put it off.

This weekend I scored myself an awesome project. The guy wanted to give it to me for free but I threw him 100 bucks. Basically paid scrap metal price for it. It was involved in a house fire and it needs plenty of love. I was actually the officer that responded to the original house fire call when it happened.

I have never run a lathe before so I figure the rebuild process will teach me a good bit about it. Everything still moves smoothly and it was well cared for before the fire. Some rust doctor, wiring, lube, and paint s
hould have it up and running again soon. Oh, and some tooling... good god the tooling.

It appears that it didn't get hot enough to melt the rubber seals and such but if it did you'd probably be better off scrapping it...too many seals and too much work changing all of them.

Just don't get it running great, haul it in a trailer, and hit a cow....trust me....don't do that.


 RIP little lathe...RIP

Tooling often costs at least as much as the lathe, and sometimes more.

I have a couple spare 4-jaw chucks I picked up over the years.
I have one 10 inch 6 jaw chuck.
While setup is longer than a 4-jaw it is good to 0.0001 inch.

It is not all that hard to make backing plates that will fit whatever
threads you lathe has on the head-stock.
It is an excellent exercise in checking out a new lathe.

Congrats on the new lathe OP.

I have the same one, and it's a solid machine.

Mine is ENCO branded/made in Taiwan.....but I'm sure there are a few other name plates this is sold under.

Only problem I've encountered is the gear oil leakage from the carriage....not enough that it's a problem, just an annoyance when it sits and drips.

But the gears, the shifting, and the power feeds haven't given me any problems.

Run-out at the head is probably is around +/- .002 ......totally acceptable in my world

Mine is a 240v single phase motor (if you were unsure) and has enough power for every project  I've done on it.

Only thing I can call a drawback on the machine is.....I wish the the spindle bore was bigger.


Good luck on your project.....and please post up any replacement parts resources you find.

Common problem on ENCO lathes.

When I looked into fixing it the seals turned out to be rather primitive.
No garter springs to hold them against the shafts , and no easy way to alter things.

Update.

So the same gentleman has offered to give me two, yes that's right, two of his CNC converted mills. Both of them are about the same level of crispy (not bad) and both will require about as much work as the lathe. One is a Central Machine 44991 and the other is an Industrial Hobbies RF-45 with a three-phase motor and VFD.

This is the Central Machine.





This is a new version of the IH machine. I don't have current pics yet.



I feel like I am taking off a hell of a big bite for my first trip down the machining tunnel. I have experience with a lot of the electronic bits that go into a CNC just never to this scale.

Also, This is what the late looks like after a weekend.

The only weakness in the ENCO line (and things like Central Machinery)
is that they often have more play than is desirable.
One of the 'tricks' is to tighten down the gibs on any direction not required for the task at hand.

I have a 12 x 48 ENCO purchased new many years ago.
We had a few of them at work that saw a lot of use in our "model shop."
An excuse to have a whole shop of inexpensive tools for engineers to make 'models' of things.

The ENCO had seen so much use over its lifetime the play was horrid.
We finally manged to get some used units from the machine shop
when everything went DRO.

We then put some DROs on the old machines bit by bit.

Are you going with mach 3 linux CNC or acorn

It’s junk...

1 mans trash is another man's treasure...

I wouldn't give a penny for that but OP sees value in it, no need to trash it in a tech forum.

It can be restored to operational status. It won't make it into a quality machine, but maybe this will fit the bill for what OP needs.

It looks like it could be a g4000 or similar 9" lathe. There are pages out there with upgrades. The cross slide is where you can give it some good improvement

The blue machine looks like he put some effort into the conversion. Looks like a central lube system. Did he use ball screws?

Yes, they both have ball screws in them.

More progress.

Got everything put back together. I don't like how far the gib on the compound is sticking out. I only have about 2 threads engaged on the rear screw adjustment and it seems too tight.

Now for the exciting news. It powers on and runs fine. I only ran it for about a minute because I have not changed the fluids yet. All of the power feeds run in all directions as well. The motor may still fail in the future or even the near future but I can deal with that if and when it happens. I think if it does, I may do a VFD conversion instead of just replacing it. Spindle seems to have right at or maybe just a bit less than .001 runout from what I measure but I don't have a tenths indicator.

You can see the stick out of the gib screw here. Any thoughts on this?
Kinda sucks the angle markings on the compound wiped right off when I was cleaning. I may have to laser engrave a new plate and mount it on there.





The Evaporust left a little black discoloration on the ways but the rust is gone and they are smooth as glass to the touch.




BTW
Evaportust Gel is absolute garbage. Leaves a sticky, chalky, bubblegum residue on everything and it is a pain in the butt to clean off. The soaked paper towels work WAY nicer.

Same as a G4003. it is a 12x36.

Tapered gib?
You can take the gib out and shim the non sliding surface side of the gib to get it sucked back in to the slide some.  I cut a long strip of brass shim stock to do that on my JET1024.  Works fine.

ETA, before I came upon the brass shim stock I used a oiled strip of paper for a shim.  It was also fine since once it's in there isn't any movement.  I just felt better about using brass once I had some available.

Yes, it is a tapered gib but my issue is the opposite of yours. I can't get it sucked in far enough. Almost like it is oversized. It was like that when I got it, just don't look right to me.

OP, when you get up and running let me know.  If you'll pay shipping, I'll pack a flat rate box of drops to practice with.  AL and CS mostly, some stressproof and 4140ph as well.

Basically all the shit that's been sitting on my saw for 5 years thinking that it's gonna get used some day.  

It's not supposed to go in all the way, it's supposed to go in until it is properly adjusted. The fact that it sticks out some means the lathe likely has very little wear and it has much life left. Over time as the lathe wears and the gibs are adjusted to take that wear out, that gib will be perfect, and then it will eventually be the opposite and you will eventually need to shim it.

As long as we ain't talking about a pallet load, I will take you up on that.

Ha. More like a Medium USPS.