Thread: Taking Chinese 3 Jaw Metal Lathe chuck apart for cleaning

Taking the Chinese 3 Jaw Metal Lathe chuck apart for cleaning. Really happy I did this. The chuck hadn't been as smooth as it had been and there was a lot of crap inside it. Back to its usual smoothness and a pleasure to use again. Never done it before and it proved fairly easy. If yours isn't smooth, don't hesitate to take it apart and clean it.

Took my chuck apart and cleaned it before I used my Chinese lathe and washed what seemed like a lot of dirt and filings out of it. Back together with a bit of grease and runs beautifully, or at least quite nicely. Did the same with the compound and cross slide, lubed with oil.

I did whip it back off today and lightly grease inside.

They do come with a lot of stuff from the factory inside them don't they Tony.

Originally Posted by Jim Ferrous

They do come with a lot of stuff from the factory inside them don't they Tony.

Wouldn't have thought that cleaning the parts before assembly would be that expensive. De-burring I can understand is a fiddly job and would take some time. None the less when you look at what you get for the price I am prepared to put a little time in to tidy it up. I can remember 25 years ago when a lot of the wood working machinery, and metal work I suspect, was out of the price range of the average hobbyist. It certainly was for me.

Tony

I suppose Tony when we talk about shaving dollars off, they talk about shaving cents off.

As you said though without Chinese tooling and machinery, most metal work projects would be just a pipe dream for me.

And there's so many guys that put up on YouTube and other parts of the web methods to mod these machines and make them even better.


Before I bought my Sieg C6 around 7 years ago, all I could find was clapped out Myford's that there owners wanted ridiculous sums of cash for.