Shopsmith Forums

On my Mark V, when I crank the speed towards slow, it's now possible to crank right past the "Slow" mark by a significant amount. (The equivalent of almost 3 letters before "A".) This just started happening, I believe right after I accidentally turned it off at high speed and then cranked it back to slow while manually rotating the shaft (maybe I was too aggressive here). How can I fix this (or do I need to)?

At the high speed everything's fine - I can crank right up to "Fast", but not beyond.

Possibly related: when reducing the speed, especially to A,B,C,D, it's always been fairly hard to turn the crank, even though I oil the sheaves regularly. Is that something I can fix?

Thanks for any help!

The manual has a "high speed" adjustment to set the dial correctly along with everything else, but first I would look inside and see if everything is OK. If you have any worn out parts in there, you need to replace them first and then go through the "high speed" adjustment to get the proper setup.

The porkchop(quadrant gear) may have mashed teeth. Caused by overly aggressive(too rapidly) adjusting towards slow. The speed control that the porkchop amount to can also become damaged by the same cause.

There is a thread by Bill Mayo(RIP) that provides a 'fix'. I will attempt to locate it and add a link to it here.

Never mind the link, here it is in pdf form.

Thanks, guys! Yeah, the quadrant gear's teeth are definitely mashed up, though not totally destroyed. I will eventually replace that.

jeff83 wrote:Thanks, guys! Yeah, the quadrant gear's teeth are definitely mashed up, though not totally destroyed. I will eventually replace that.

Try Bill Mayo's fix first.

That Headstock Improvement file is one of three files I actually have on the main page of Shopsmith Large Format Drawings, Illustrations and More thread in Maintenance and Repair. Most of all the numerous files under My Google Drive are too large to post in the forum itself and why the My Google Drive exists in the first place.

Be sure to read the last page. It was an update request I got from Bill to add to the write up that he felt was one of the most important things.

at https://www.shopsmith.com/ss_forum/view ... 90#p185690

It's just below the area with the link to My Google Drive documents, and the same file James posted above.

At last count it had been downloaded over 3300 times in the thread.

I really miss Bill. He and I used to have amazing talks. Bill was going to collaborate with me on a Motor Book and I had been invited out to stay in his home with he and Ann in Florida.

Before I could arrange my schedule to go, Bill got sick again, continued going downhill and sadly passed away. He was a good man and like JPG, another of my mentors here. Thankfully, James is still with us and very active here.

Everett