So, I am lying in bed planning.  I have always done this.  Counting sheep holds no charm for me; my horny-handed cousins on the farm in Missouri had ruined this for me with ghastly tales of sordid couplings in the barn; I was about 12 and very impressionable.  Trying to grasp the implications of the whore/madonna ewe had damaged me sorely.  Instead I plan things I will build.  Since I am unable to draw plans I must keep going over them in my head to see that nothing has changed, or needs changing;  this is loosely called twilight engineering.

I had settled in one noc with my latest project, the counter shaft system for Flather the lathe, but something was bothering me.  Hmmmm....something was clinging to one of my feet.  I suspected the cat but saw that she was on top of the covers.  I kicked to get my foot clear.  The drag on my foot seemed only to increase; something awkward was happening to me.  One foot just wasn't right under the covers.  I kicked again; still not free I began kicking frantically.  Pat awoke and asked me what I was doing:  "isn't it time to sleep?" she asked in that sweet voice that means I better have a damned good explanation for why I had awakened her.  Something has hold of my leg, I told her, kicking even more violently.  Her eyes got large.  Convusively I kicked the covers completely off of us to get at my opponent.  I held my afflicted foot up in the air and gaped at it.

Someone had left a pair of jockey shorts around one ankle.  I frowned and looked at Pat.  She shook her head, said "hoooooooo boy..." and rolled over.  I got myself resettled and continued to plan.

I have been advised by professionals, sent plans by the knowledgable, and encouraged to do a good, clean job of it by well-wishers.  My propensity is to reinvent the wheel.  I cannot explain this.  The very idea of reinventing the wheel has connotations of stupidity and self-destructive tendencies about it.  But I can't help myself.  Here is what the reinvention looks like.

Personnel in the Planning Department Jockey for Top Honors

I will freely admit that my counter shaft looks much like others, so I didn't go so far as to do something really odd.  It is just that I started out one piece at a time measuring, cutting, drilling and bolting and kept adding pieces as it seemed to make sense.  It's a lot like Legos.

The wooden cone pulley, which does a fair job of mirroring the one on Flather, is made of pieces of firewood laminated, cut circular on the bandsaw and then made round and crowned on a lathe.  The wood worked ok at 340 rpm with hss tooling; not a great finish, but passable.  Having never turned wood before I wasn't sure what to expect.

First I put two 7' pieces of  about 3x3x1/4 angle iron upright behind Flather and leaned them on him.  Next I took 2 short pieces of  tubing, about 1.5" square, and cut out one side so that they would clamp down over the drip pan.  I marked where they met the uprights and drilled to attach.  A red arrow in the pic to the left sort of shows this.

The next point of contact is where the uprights lean on the back gear shaft castings.  I thought of drilling thru at these points and tapping for a small bolt, but it doesn't seem to be necessary.

Above that I pivoted both the braces that hold the countershat and the shelf that holds the motor from the same point on each side.  Nothing was really planned, just a lot of eyeballling.

I decided to start with a smaller motor and then work up if needed.  This is an old Craftsman 1 hp, 120v, 1725 rpm.

I needed as much disparity in my driving and driven pulleys as I could get and managed about 2.5" driving to 13.5" driven.  I slowed it all down enough that I have 7 usable speeds, from 32 to 600 rpm.  I don't know what the top speed, #8, is, but it is more than I wish to put on babbitts.  Both the motor and the countershaft bearings have room to slide in their mounts for adjustment to get the v belt tension right.

I fully expected to have a hell of a time keeping the flat belt on its pulleys.  But it works perfect and doesn't seem to be nearly as finicky as I had expected.  I did turn a 2 degree arc on the wooden pulleys.  The belt is an old piece of knobbly orange stuff I had around.  I let the c.s. side turnbuckles down, measured, cut a length, and made up a belt on the neat old Yankee Clipper belt lacing machine.  Once I put it on I tighten the turnbuckles up until the belt grabbed enough to turn the spindle.  I don't see how it is possible to change the belt with the lathe running.  I have to shut down, loosen the turnbuckles, slip the belt over, reset the turnbuckles and hit the power.  Not a big deal for me.  So, the turnbuckles on the c.s. side are very necessary, but the ones on the motor side could be replaced with rods as my adjustment is done by sliding the motor in slots on its base plate.  The switch is rated 20 amps to 270 volts, in case I need to go to a 240 motor later.

Until I get Flather leveled there is not a lot I can do toward testing him.  I did do a few small cuts and it was most satisfying.  The cost of all this was minimal as the motor and most of the metal was just scrap stuff.  About $100 total in steel, switch and bearings.

For those of you hounding me for pics of Hudson, the $400 Clausing 8540 horizontal mill, here he is.  I told you he had some rust.  But actually I think he will be fine.  I am awaiting the manual before I start tearing into him.  The table is certainly pristine, and the belts look very good.  Only one arbor with him, and no outboard support for the arms, but I am very  happy.  

To briefly recapitulate what I posted elsewhere, the eponymous Hudson came from the same-named town somewhere in the wilds above Bangor, Maine.  He had been listed in Uncle Henrys online ads for a week, and I hadn't hurried into contacting the seller as I figured if this was the mill I was supposed to have, after months of looking, then it would happen regardless.  This might seem a rather flakey approach to some, but it is a sort of karmic tool consciousness that only the very cool can manage.  Anyway, I called the guy and he hadn't had a single inquiry, probably because he left town just after placing the ad and had just come home.  I assured him I would drive on up and find him.  This is not always easy in Maine as the natives give those of us who are obviously from 'away' some very strange directions.  His were good; I figured he was either a decent guy or badly needed the money.  Oh, before I would even go up we established on the phone that he didn't really expect to get the $ 500 he was asking.  I arrived before dark after 130 miles of rain and fog and found his shop locked up tight as a nun's bum.  Called him on the cell phone and he had run off on a generator job and would be back in 20 minutes.  A couple of more similar calls, every 20 minutes, and I just curled up and went to sleep in Rosie's cab.  He woke me sometime after dark and we went into the shop.  There was Hudson on a p/u truck.  We talked and looked and hemmmed and hawwwed and when I offered $400 he accepted.  I think it was partly due to the fact he was so embarassed that I had fallen asleep in his driveway.  He was a sturdy young lad and with a few encouraging pushes and grunts from me he slid Hudson from the bed of his truck into Rosie's.  The next day I was able to chain Hudson to the bucket of Chuckles, the Kubota, and lift him out and get him to the shop.  Took me 3 more days to get him inside as the ground outside the shop doors had frost-heaved enough that I had to dig out the for doors to swing open.  That stuff is like concrete and I pulled a back muscle the first day.  And that is about all there is to know.  don e.