Denford Software & Machines

Hi I've just purchased the Viceroy lovely old lathe the only thing is the powerfeed is not working im hoping it's a shear pin has any one got pictures of the gearbox offending item and how they fixed it cheers Steve

If you're going to take the front off the gearbox beware that getting the tumbler rack gear back on correctly is a bit of a trial because the gear and the spline have odd numbers of teeth so there are a lot of possible iterations to put it back together and you can't see to do it because the front plate has to go on first. If you get it wrong you'll strip teeth off in the gearbox. The lever on the side of the gearbox is held onto the tumbler pinion with a single bolt. When you remove the lever the tumbler falls all the way down until it's no longer engaged with the rack. Once you lose this engagement it's near impossible to guarantee getting it back correctly without removing the gearbox and to do that you have to strip and remove the headstock.

You can do it with trial and error but you risk not getting full tooth engagement in the box.

Bottom line is - do everything you can to get the front plate off without removing the side lever. Once you have the plate off use a centre punch or something to mark the tooth engagement on the pinion and rack, and mark the lever position on the spline.

Thanks Pete it sounds like a right mare of a job might have to look out for a expert down on the south coast

Ah, you'll have to disregard everything I've written above Steve, I just did a search for the PCS and it doesn't have the full screw cutting gearbox that I'm describing. Yours has 2 round dials for coarse/fine and threading/feeding. It should be a simple matter to discover what's wrong.

Cheers Pete but does anyone know where to look for the shear pin before i start dismantling ?

Did you ever have any luck getting the power feed working? The power feed on my Viceroy does not engage completely and was easily tracked down to a worn worm. Interestingly, the worm wheel looks in good condition.

Brian

Hi it's been awhile but we eventually found where the shear pin was located here is a video

https://youtu.be/_twEpwia_es