I think what you meant to say was "Get a room, you two!" 🤣 Thanks for watching John!

Agreed. Rivetts are industrial art pieces. I get so jealous.

Thanks for watching, guys!

Thanks! When the pandemic hit I spent all my shop time making parts for a local medical manufacturer, and that's stuff I wasn't allowed to show. We then ended up moving very far away, and the new house has been a lot of work. We have a nice barn here that will be my new shop and office, but it is far from usable yet. I thought about posting an update video that would be mostly me talking about all that, but previous videos of that nature were not very well received so I didn't bother. I'll definitely be back in due time though.

@@TheJoyofPrecision I certainly understand. That is a lot of adjustments to make in one's life. I very much look forward to your return to the Tube! Take care and I wish you and yours the very best and a very Merry Christmas!

Thanks very much Emma! 🙂

Hi Juan! You're right about heat treatment techniques, I read once that Rivett (and others) would quench their finest bearing steel into liquid mercury. Small wonder we don't do that today. 🙂

I blame it all on Timken for inventing the roller bearing :)

Automobile plain bearings regularly last 500,000 miles. As long as you keep them lubricated, don't overload them, and spin the spindle fast enough to maintain the oil film the spindle is riding on the bearings will last a very long time. Most plain bearing wear occurs at startup and this is hard on lathe bearings where start-stop is the normal operation of the machine.

True. Locomotive bearings had much the same performance. But the Timken bearings introduced the other factor: ease of maintenance, so the old #1111 loco became the industry standard for locos. In the world of watchmaker's lathes, plain bearings were standard until Foley (I think, may have been Rivett) introduced tapered bearings. Today nobody makes plain bearings on lathes, for same reason that Timken made its name with #1111. Ease of maintenance.

@@aceroadholder2185 fascinating! Are they still used? Commercial trucks maybe?

Haha thanks Warren!

Thanks very much Robin! 🙂

😂🤣 Thanks for watching, as always!!

Haha yeah it's always a suspenseful moment the first time you look at some bearings on a used machine. Thanks for watching!

And I look forward to disappointing you! 😂 Seriously though, thanks for watching!

@@TheJoyofPrecision Just keep doing what you're doing. You have a beautiful machine there.

Thanks Jerry!! I'll be back in the machining-video-saddle again before long. Are you a home shop machinist at all? You strike me as the type.

Those old Starks are wonderful machines! Thanks for watching, glad you enjoyed it.

It's amazing how long a well made machine will hold up and still produce good work 🙂 Thanks for watching!

Thanks for watching! If I understand your question, then the answer is it's solved by bearing angle and surface area (of which there is much) combined with a film of the appropriate oil type. I imagine the angle of the bearing taper also plays a crucial role. Take note of that double angle taper on the front bearing - the steeper angle toward the nose is probably key to preventing binding under axial load during cutting. Of course both angles must be lapped together perfectly for this to arrangement to work. It's no wonder these machines cost as much as a house when they were new.

Thanks very much!

Hi Pierre, thanks for watching! The lathe was manufactured by Rivett, in Boston. They were arguably the finest precision bench top lathes money could buy, back then.

@@TheJoyofPrecision Clear now. I thought that rivett spindles were a kind of spindle technology! Thanks and acknowledgements for your great channel.

Hi Poppy, thanks for watching! The lathe has only one compound. The tool holder was Rivett's patented design and is only found on some Rivett and Hjorth lathes. The lathe is shown in most of my videos, if you want to see more of it in action.

My pleasure! It's the LittleMachineShop Hi-Torque Mini Mill. For general work of smaller size, it's good - I think it's one of the better import mill/drills of this size, it really is small. If you can accommodate something like a used Bridgeport or Burke, then absolutely get one of those instead, if they aren't overpriced in your region. If you have the space constraint, as I do, then it's hard to beat one of these for the price. Of course a watchmaker size Sixis, Aciera, or Schaublin, would be far superior - but also 4-5 times the cost. I like the LMS version because it has larger base and table castings, with more x and y travel, has R8 spindle, has belt-drive spindle, has variable speed brushless DC drive & motor, has dovetailed column, and a fixed (non-pivoting) base. At the time (several years ago), some of those were features not offered on other import mill/drills - now you can find several companies selling these SIEG-based mills with most or all of those same features. The only thing I really dislike about it is the fine downfeed for the Z axis. It's a rather sloppy worm drive so there's a lot of backlash - it doesn't hurt anything, but it does let the rest of the machine down. The tram spec was something like 0.005", which is already a lot, but even then mine was out of spec. I used Stefan's copper wire & epoxy technique to get it trammed in. Typical of sliding dovetails on cheap import machine tools, the gib tension has to be tweaked as you move to different areas of travel. A weekend of crude scraping on it would probably go a long way.

Astute observation!

Thanks! Haha, Canadian cutting oil is bacon grease. Little running gag between Justin and I, from the podcast. 🙂

@@TheJoyofPrecision Back when I started in the shop 55 years ago, they used bacon grease. It actually works well, especially tapping cold rolled steel... but on a cold morning the shop smelled like bacon and eggs from the smoke and I'd be starving! Cheers from NC/USA

@@aceroadholder2185 lol! It really does work well 🙂

On all 608s, and 8" Precisions like mine, it is scratched into the rear of the name plate on the carriage, by Mr. Higgins, Rivett's master scraping hand.