Shopsmith Forums

dusty wrote:Congratulations on your win and your great success acquiring the Mark V.

With no more hours than that, you have an almost brand new Mark V. Before it has another hour to log, do a good job of cleaning and LUBRICATING. Lubricating regularly is the life line for this machine.

If it just set in storage, you might (just maybe) need to replace belts but you'll know that after you log some hours. If it runs smooth and reasonably quiet the belts will not be a problem.

Again, CONGRATULATIONS and welcome to this great family of users.

Thanks for the welcome. This thing now purrs like a kitten! I really didn't do as much due diligence as I should have, so I got incredibly lucky with the condition of the machine. I certainly know what to check for the next time I am in the market (and I also realize the value of purchasing new, from the manufacturer now!).

I am pretty adamant about following maintenance cycles, after several failures of machines I have worked around that were directly due to lack of proper maintenance.

It took me about 8 hours just to open the headstock, blow it out, lube the motor and idler shafts, clean and lubricate the quadrant control plus worm gear, clean the quill, wax the quill teeth, and seal the headstock back up! Of course, most of that time was admiring the simple elegance of the engineering, and making sure that I was lubricating spots that needed lubrication, and NOT lubricating spots that DONT need it

On a side note, thanks for all the links. SS certainly has quite a few sites, that would be nice if all the info were in one place. I think an entire training session on just how to navigate their website wouldn't be out of order for the traveling University, and I work in IT! I would also find a PDF file (so one could zoom in and out) of the different assemblies, with a legend, in a single document INCREDIBLY helpful. I found, the exploded views, and those are marginally helpful, but for someone like me who:

• Is too lazy to go to the opthamologist, and
• Uses a little tiny laptop screen for portability, and
• would like the ability to print out the document in large scale to refer to in the shop

This would be an AWESOME value-added addition to the site (assuming this sort of thing isn't there already).

It appears SS would rather SELL you a manual rather than GIVE you one on line.

Can't much blame them!! Makes business sense to me. At least you CAN get them for "older" products.

Good Luck with "new" SS.

jpg40504 wrote:It appears SS would rather SELL you a manual rather than GIVE you one on line.

Can't much blame them!! Makes business sense to me. At least you CAN get them for "older" products.

Good Luck with "new" SS.

The Mark V manual used to be on-line; at least the major part of it was. The first chapter (the part that has all the safety advise) was not included. When Nick came on back board, one of his early objectives was to make the manual complete and update some parts of it. Unfortunately, that never got completed.