My Hercus 9 Restoration.

My Hercus 9 Restoration has started, I am hoping any Hercus or Southbend owners will be able to help me.
Finally got a nice cool day for a change, only 41°C.

So I thought I would start cleaning up my Hercus 9 and try and keep the missus happy.
I saw this lathe advertise in Alice Springs in a recycling yard ( Alice is the closest town 500 Km away) in March last year, I only wanted the stand for my Hercus 260, but when I picked it up I found out it was an Hercus ARL.
When I bought her home, I had to dismantle her to get her off the trailer and stacked the parts on an obsolete hospital bed, 6 month later I transferred to a different department at work so bought home my bench that I originally took there because it was too big for my shed.
For some reason the missus is keeps whinging about 2 lathes, a hospital bed and a bench on the back veranda, strange woman.

Inside the cabinet amongst the swarf, rust, cobwebs and dirt., I found these goodies.
As well as the spare parts manual with the inspection certificate inside it.

Just a couple of photo showing the crap in her.



Bit of a difference.

After I strip it back to bare metal, primed it with a kill rust primer, what further steps do I take before painting?

What is the best way to straighten this door?
Approx 3mm thick.

Well for painting visit a real paint store, not a big box hardware store. Inquire about the machine tool suitable paints they can get for you. One part paints are likely at the low end followed by two part Urathane and epoxies. I would certainly go for a two part solution if you can merge the cost into the budget.

As for prep follow the directions for whatever paint you end up buying. Generally you need to start with clean metal and use a reccomended primer.

I’m not a big fan of hardware store spray paints as they just don’t hold up well on machine tools. This machine of yours literally looks like it was painted with such paints. That is rust through where there should have been little wear.

Cast iron is a bigger problem when it comes to painting. Mainly because it is porous and may have a lot of oil in those pores. Depending about how bad it is you may want to bake the castings (warm them up) to try to force the oil out. It is likely obvious but oil and other surface contamination will undermine your painting efforts. Frankly you pictures seem to indicate some pretty dry castings but be careful like can stay in a casting for a very long time.

As for the door is there anybody near by with a big press? I suppose you could take the body shop approach and bang it into submission. Either way the material has stretched at this point, it likely will never look new again. If you lack the tools it might be easier have a sheet metalshop fab a new one. You might have some success ona large table and with a big hammer but 3mm is thick enough to say it won’t be trivial.

By the way so far that lathe appears to be fairly decent, I’ve seen far worse. With it all torn apart this would be a good time to check the ways on the bed. It is fairly common to see a lot of wear on the bed near the chuck. With the lathe torn apart this would be a good time to grind the ways if needed. Grinding won’t be cheap but it will make for a lathe that will last a long time with a properly fitted saddle.