March 15

And finally, after everything is cleaned and primed, I'm painting.  I chose Benjamin Moore Alkyd Enamel.  Its fairly expensive- about $40/gallon at Ace Hardware, but its quite good paint, and dries smooth even when painting by brush- which I had to do, lacking a spray booth.  I also like the BM primer a lot more than Kilz.  It seems to attain a harder finish, though it takes lots longer to dry.

It took about a month to do all the little bits and pieces.  For one thing, the BM Alkyd paint takes a while to dry, and I put two coats on everything.  However, it came out well;



The paper towels stuck in the gearbox are to soak up the oil so it won't drip onto the stand.  Since I used TSP on the gearbox, there was a fair bit of wet, half-dissolved crud still up inside which took a little while to be displaced with fresh oil.  I'm just not dedicated enough to take apart the gearbox itself.

September 2004- OK, so I'm feeling guilty about not cleaning the gearbox, so sometime this fall I'll take it to bits and give it a proper overhaul.






Here is the headstock & tailstock- quite an improvement there.

Note to self; next time I paint something, also mask the oilers.  At least I only painted them with primer and it scrapes off without too much trouble...





All the little bits came out well.  I went ahead and stripped and painted the switch- it had already been painted that horrible green color.





Here's the apron after using Citristrip, just before priming and painting- not the best stripping job in the world, but it worked well enough.  Getting all the dissolved paint off was a real drag.  Next time I'd try a different approach.  I couldn't dislodge the cross pin in the carriage handwheel without doing bad things, so it didn't get electrolized- but I did clean it up a bit with steel wool.

Now that I've worked on a lathe a bit, I would have cleaned the carriage by removing the cross-feed and detaching the apron from the saddle.  The apron is held on by screws- no magic involved, and the cross-feed assembly is easy to unscrew once the apron is detached.


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