Rusty Lathe Chuck Restoration | Better Than New?!

It’s been a while since my last video with the presentation of my new Emco CNC lathe.
This 40 year old benchtop CNC lathe needs a few fixes until it is fully functional again.

One of the first things I did, was to restore the rusty chuck which came with the machine.

When I started the project I was convinced that there are no new chucks available for this particular spindle mount of my machine. Even used original Emco chucks are extremely expensive and rare so I decided it is better to preserve the one I got with the machine.

I cleaned and derusted all the parts and installed a new bronze bushing for the plane spiral bearing. Unfortunately after all of this was done, the chuck run horribly bad. Around 0,5mm of runout error was the highest measured number. So somehow I made the chuck worse or better, I haven’t even measured the accuracy before, so perhaps it was already in this state.

But anyway now began the real work of measuring, redoing parts over and over again until I finally tamed the chuck to give the excellent runout number of about 0,01mm.

With this result I could have been absolutely satisfied but during the restoration process I found out that one lathe from Proxxon shares the exact same spindle nose with my Emco compact 5 CNC.
I contacted Proxxon and asked, if they want to support me and are willing to sponsor me one of their lathe chucks. I’m glad to say they did and sent me a beatiful new chuck for my lathe.
This new chuck is extremely well made and without any modification it runs true to less than 0,01mm of a millimeter.
So my greatest thanks to the company Proxxon for generous support!!

Please check out their products:
- www.proxxon.com

I hope you enjoyed this video.
Please let me know what you think in the comments.
If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to share. I try to read and reply to all.

Thany you very much for your support! I highly do appreciate that!

Patreon: www.patreon.com/wecandothatbetter

00:00 Intro
01:28 Disassembling of the chuck
03:09 Cleaning the parts
04:19 Cleaning up the plane spiral
05:35 Derusting the parts
06:47 Restoring the plane spiral
09:05 Installing a new bronze bearing
12:59 Moment of truth - it's worse
13:58 First correction
15:42 Second correction
18:12 Third correction
19:36 Fourth correction
20:50 Almost there - last correction
21:49 Finishing the chuck body parts
22:45 Cold bluing and final assembly
24:10 Final result
24:32 Spindle nose cleaning
25:00 Final chuck mounting
25:24 A gift from Proxxon!