Reply To: Water Pump seals ?

[Ed@deathwish-outboards]

Fourteen years ago I drove 75 miles to look at a Craftsman lathe advertised on Craigslist. I paid $250.00 for a tool chest full of tooling and half a truck load of parts. When all was sorted out I found I had parts of a 6″ Atlas lathe, parts of an Atlas milling machine, most of a 12″ x 36″ Craftsman/Atlas lathe and some pieces I may never know what they are for. After about a year of completely striping,cleaning, hunting missing parts and then re assembling and setting up I had a working machine which a lot of true machinists would argue is only a cousin of a real lathe. However it works very well for what I do with it. In addition to drive shafts I have used it to true up flywheels and even turn a float hing pin for an old Tillotson Carb.

Back to drive shafts, if you can put one end of a shaft in the chuck of a drill and the other end in a hole in a board with a piece of oily rag to lubricate it, then one person can control the rotation of the shaft while another holds the emery cloth or sandpaper to the sealing surface. That makes a primitive lathe but it is better than none at all. When I do something like this I use a piece of flat steel or even hardwood behind the emery cloth to make sure you are sanding or polishing evenly across the surface.