Hardinge HLV-H Lathe, Old but Beautiful Lady

I too enjoyed refurbishing 1972 make Ferrel Roll grinder for a steel plant. Luckily I got full circuit. I think lathe is very simple and you can adopt a new lathe control strategy.

Beautiful piece of equipment - you are so lucky and I wish you the best of luck getting her up to scratch.

Hi

I have the same model as yours which I use nearly every day. Most of my work involves making "one off" parts so I still use it in preference to my little CNC lathe.

It will give you endless hours of enjoyment. My manual is almost illegible so I will follow up some of the links on your thread.

As a matter of interest, what do you intend to use it for?

BF

Hi Brian Falconer,

I had a Leinen lathe built 1947, very primitive, no motorised x and y drive.

Main spindle bronze conical bearings, lubricated by wicks that are intended to be fed with oil daily. Some a** that had access to the machine for some time neglected the lubrication and the main bearing wore down to 0.5mm play vertically and nearly no play horizontally.

So there was the discussion open about spending one week or more and rework or look after a better one - the Hardinge came luckily by chance.

Intention to use: I am building a special super-precision lathe with 3 old (1984?) Moore slides that came from IBM hard-disk turning machines. At that time the hard-disks had 11 or 12" or near that. The screws are super-perfect with less than 0.3µm error per revolution, the slides too, the radial bearings also super-perfect but the axial bearings damaged. The axial bearings are much too small for the mass to be moved - may be if smoothly driven by the original DC motor then ok, but I changed the DC to a powerful Berger-Lahr 3phase stepper with 10000 (micro)steps per rev, one step 0.3µm travel! The radial needles (very short only) of the bearings have left definite indents on all 4 surfaces. I will relap and repolish these and try a bronze bearing instead. Hopefully with success. Else I will modify the axial bearings to hydrostatic.

What is your use?

Regards

RHABE

Hi

I live in a rural area of Scotland and have a small engineering business ( no employees), the mainstay of my business is developing machines for use in agriculture, from conception to finished product, I do all the work "in house", design, machining, fabrication, welding, hydraulics and controls etc.

I also get a fair amount of work from other engineers in the area who do not have the facilities to do the job themselves, which is mainly where the Hardinge gets used, either renovating worn/broken parts or making new ones, or making specific purpose tools. I really like the facility whereby you can cut a thread at fairly high speed right up to a shoulder without fear of having a collision.

As you can imagine I don't work to the degree of precision which you do, and probably don't treat the lathe as kindly as I should, however it is there to help me earn a living and has served me well in the 20yrs I have owned it.

Some aspects of it need attention but I cannot afford to have it out of commision for any length of time.

Please keep me informed as to the progress of your project, it sound very interesting.

regards

Brian Falconer

Your enterprise sounds quite amazing: every day a new challenge, to be solved totally in house!

If you ever have difficult question lease don't hesitate to contact me.

Next approach in the ultraprecision machine will be regrinding-relapping-repolishing the slightly indented (by the rollers) axial bearings and replace the retainers with rollers by solid bronze rings. I don't know if I am coming near the intended parallelity needed to preserve original quality (0.1 µm non-parallelity???) I will try with 2 optical proof plates.

It's my fault that the bearings are no longer ok., at first setup of a machine with these guideways (many years ago) I changed the DC-motors for high power steppers (3phase Berger-Lahr).

Although we turned down the current to these motors and use the microstep mode with 0.3µm per step the force on the axial bearing is much too high for a radial needle bearing. (The mass to be moved is between 100 and 200Kg).

In 2 weeks I shall know more.

RHABE