LMS 5200 mini lathe spindle wobbling

Hi everyone

I’ve just took a delivery of a new littlemachineshop hitorque mini lathe 5200 and taking a look at it.

It has quite a bit if a runout and i took a side gear box cover off and noticed a pretty bad wobble of the rear part of the spindle. Here is the video. The gear is wobbling pretty noticeably. This does not seem to help with the runout I guess. Also there is noticeable vibration on certain RPMs.

I am wondering if it is just an unlucky one that I have, or are all of the chinese mini lathe spindles like that?

Any suggestions on what to do with it are welcome.


https://youtu.be/1QYtfi224fY

As long as the business end is good that back end wobble is not too much to worry about

WOW, that is bad. Did you talk to LMS about this? What do they say?

Arturo Duncan

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Originally Posted by ZipSnipe

As long as the business end is good that back end wobble is not too much to worry about

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Well, how about the following factors:

1. Vibration that is introduced by this assymetry - i feel that the lathe vibrates at certain RPMs - don’t you think this may wear out the bearings ultimately
2. Since the gear on the spindle is not centered, there is a floating distance between the axis of this gear and the axis of the next gear in the gearbox that passes rotation to the leading shaft. I guess this might be not good for threading, for example, as it might give uneven lead of the cutting tool.

Also there are some lucky guys that do not have this wobbling. Makes me think that the quality varies from lathe to lathe, and probably littlemachine.com is not bothering checking some basic operation of the lathe prior to shipping it to the customer :(

Quote:

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Originally Posted by arturod

WOW, that is bad. Did you talk to LMS about this? What do they say?

Arturo Duncan

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I’ve emailed the littlemachine.com, waiting for their reply and suggestions. Hopefully they will come up with some solution.

Got the reply from the littlemachine.com that they " do not see a problem". I guess I should have purchased from a bigger company.

Measure the run out and complain VIGEROUSLY !!!

Don