A Big Lathe Story

In about 2003, I answered an ad from Ron Kyllo that he had tools for sale. After speaking to his wife Dorrie, I visited their home along the Red River south of Fargo.

It’s a sad story but a love story too. Ron was a patternmaker in Fargo for many years, but a few years before had been paralyzed by a mysterious illness and now had to be on a respirator 24 hours a day. His wife Dorrie gives him awesome care.

Ron and Dorrie had some amazing tools for sale from his patternmaking business. I bought a couple of band saws, including the 20” Delta I still use. I also was intrigued by the huge Oliver patternmaking lathe that he had in his garage. He told me it weighed 3500 pounds and that he had used it to turn many patterns, including the patterns for generations of Steiger tractors. A pattern is a wooden form that a patternmaker turns to very careful specifications which is then used to shape a sand core into which cast iron or steel is poured to make cast metal parts.

Ron said the lathe had originally been in a marine shipyard in Florida but had been shipped to the Fargo Foundry years before and used there for many years. It had a three phase motor with 4 speeds, but Ron had jury rigged a way to turn larger patterns on the outboard end and he didn’t know for sure that the motor still worked after not being used for 15 years.

I decided that I didn’t have room for it in my shop so I didn’t proceed with it at that time.

But in 2006, when I decided to take a pastoral call in Perham, MN, and during the time when I had moved out of my Fargo shop and was waiting to build a new shop in Perham, I took a look at that lathe once again and bought it for $750. My wife Merrie Sue is a good sport about a lot of things, but even she wondered at my sanity in buying this lathe. “Now explain to me, please” she asked, “how you didn’t buy this lathe before because you didn’t think you had room in the shop. But now, when you don’t have any shop at all, you buy the lathe?” And I answered back, “Honey, this is so easy. Now that I don’t have any shop, I am only limited by my imagination and I have plenty of room.” Thanks to her for understanding, because I now do have a shop with plenty of space for this lathe, the flagship of my fleet of lathes. .

My son Mark and I used a shop crane to lift the disassembled pieces into my tandem trailer and haul them to the metalworking shop of Jerry Swedberg in rural Rollag. Jerry is an amazing machinist and was willing to make a riser block to raise up the headstock and tailstocks of the lathe from 16” to 32”.

He worked on it for a couple of months as I was making a space at our new lake lot for the lathe. We even planned for it by pouring the concrete twice as thick in the area where we moved the lathe.

We had another problem, to get the lathe to run. I knew it had run 15 years ago but not since. I couldn’t rotate the shaft, but I tried to pull out as much old grease as I could and then put new fresh grease in. The I tried to rotate the shaft, and finally but sluggishly it began to turn. In the meantime I bought a variable frequency drive that would be the speed control and would also convert the single phase power from my power system into the three phase that would run my motor.

I also found my particular lathe on the web and found it was an Oliver Model 25 patternmaking lathe.

As I looked more carefully at the motor and downloaded the schematics for the lathe that I found on the web, I realized that the lathe was wired for 2 phase power, obsolete since the 1950’s Very hesitantly, I changed some wiring contacts to a three phase configuration. I also had to do some fixing on the contacts on the main circuit board. Some shorting on the contacts had melted part of the circuit board and I cut up some circuit box plastic and formed it around the spring loaded contacts to keep them in line. Then I invited Larry Lange, a member of my congregation who is a very experienced troubleshooter of machinery. He had kept the machinery going at the Barrel of Fun potato chip factory for many years. He and a friend came and gave me courage to put power to the motor. Nothing happened at first, but then I realized we needed to wedge the relays that would have turned the circuit board on. With a wooden wedge in there, we did find there was power to the circuits. Then I did some switching of the 4 RPM settings and lo and behold, it very slowly began to turn over. I switched it to the 600 RPM setting and it ran faster. As the grease started to warm up and loosen up the bearings, the motor began to work like a charm. I turned the columns below for my shop while the lathe was still in the garage attached to my house. Then, I finally moved it into the spot in my shop where it sits now. I have turned big and small columns on it, often using the big 30” diameter steady rest Mike Nebosis from New York Mills built to my specifications. I installed an I beam above the shop with two chain hoists on it so I can lift up to 1000 pounds. Even to move the steady rest or tail stock demands the help of the hoists.

I have turned bowls over 20” in diameter and it worked like a charm for that too. I can only imagine the big projects I will turn on this big lathe.