Major surgery (for my lathe. . .)

Ah, poor Stubby 750 lathe, and poor, poor me! My controller unit died right before the AAW symposium - the week I actually had scheduled to do some turning in order to come up with some new pieces for the instant gallery.

Fortunately, Bill Rubenstein was at the symposium and I was able to order a replacement kit that was delivered while I was still on vacation.




The first thing to do (after disconnecting the power) was to remove all the old parts and put my lathe back on the bed of the stand. Steve was very nice about helping with the electrical stuff. I did most of the rest of the rebuild.






After the lathe was reassembled, the new controller was mounted on a plate attached to the end of the lathe. That was actally the most difficult part of the whole process - drilling and tapping holes into the stand.








The rewiring part was easy to do as was synchronizing the controller to the motor. Bill sent detailed step-by-step instructions.















The new controller works well. I still need to adjust the braking, but that is supposed to be easy to do as well.

The blue tape was for holding the metal plate to the stand while I drilled the first couple of holes.

It was very frustrating to me to not have my lathe working while I needed to be productive, and then to have to go away for a few weeks and fret about it. I'm glad the fix was relatively straightforward and easy to do.