With the QCGB and lead screw removed, removing the apron was a piece of cake: just remove the two cheesehead screws. Here's what it looked like. Oh, yeah... it's completely full of crap. And that folks is why South Bend touted the double-walled apron on their bigger lathes. It's a wonder it was still working at all, although I did have a problem with the half-nuts interlock which would need to be fixed.
Awhile ago I replaced the spindle felts, set the bearing clearance etc on my South Bend 10K. I intended to finish the rest of the lathe in a month or so, but now it's two years later! That's the trouble when you have a working lathe, you would just rather use it then do the maintenance, but now it's past time to finish the job that was started. It also didn't hurt that I made a pledge to myself not to put a DRO on the mill until the lathe is finished.
Once I had a dedicated toolbox just for the mill, it was time to make some holders for the mill tooling. Someone on Ebay is selling collet holders made out of 1/2" PVC sheet. If you paint it black and then machine it you get a nice contrast with the white PVC. Of course, where's the thrill in buying something already made? Unfortunately I don't have my table saw any more, so I had to cut the pieces with a saber saw and use the mill to clean-up the cuts.
Like most people, I'm always in need of more tool storage space, but it's gotten really bad since I bought the mill. Unfortunately the shop is 99.95% full, but somehow I managed to clear-out enough room for a Harbor Freight 18" end cabinet. I've had the Harbor Freight 44" Red Roller for a few years now and it's been a good toolbox. Of course, I don't have enough room to just hang the end cabinet off the 44" cabinet as intended, so I had to make a frame for some casters so it can be used as a stand-alone.
Adjusting the gibs, along with tramming the head to the table, is one of those final adjustments the owner is expected to do. Here's how I did it. The gibs exist to take-up the slack in the dovetails. If they are too tight, you wear the dovetails excessively. If they are too loose, the table flops around in the breeze. This is something you need to take some time with and get right, but the good news is that after they are adjusted that setting should be good for a long time.
On my SB 10K, the nut used to tighten-down the steady rest is sometimes awkward to reach. It's obvious that SB intended the use of the tailstock wrench, unfortunately over the years the original nut was lost and replaced with a modern 7/16-14 HD nut. The tailstock wrench is 25/32 and it's been a long time since you've been able to buy a nut that size. Well, I have a lathe and a mill that just happens to have a rotary table installed so this seems like a good time to make some nuts.
I bought an older Jacobs 14N Super Chuck off of Ebay a few years ago. The chuck was in great shape with virtually no wear, but wow was it hard to turn: very gritty. I finally decided to pull it apart and clean it. I made some custom arbor spacers on the lathe so the actual chuck disassembly was quite easy. My press, Big Orange, had no trouble separating the chuck parts.
I like using stops for repetitive operations and the one on the quill can come in very handy. Unfortunately, like most mills and drill presses the stop is just a knurled nut and it can take quite a few twists to get it into position. Quick adjusting nuts are available, but almost all of them are for SAE threads and all the threads on this mill are metric. The project is to make a new threaded rod for a quick-adjust stop nut.
Made a indicator holder from a casting kit from Model Lathe Engineering (MLA-8). My lathe doesn't have a DRO and probably never will, so for precision X movement I usually use a Shar's magnetic-backed dial indicator reading off the saddle. It works great, but sometimes it would have been nice to have the extra movement a 2" indicator provides. Unfortunately, I found that using a magnetic back on this indicator doesn't work well because the long stem interferes with the lathe's gear box.
For my next mill project I will need to use a slotting saw. The blades were bought on Ebay a few months ago, but I still needed an arbor so I made one today. And here it is completed.