Van Norman 22L feed drive bearing replacement

Hi,
I scraped the column of my VN 22LU and while reinserting the feed shaft, I found
the bearings to be pretty rough, so I decided to remove them for replacement.

I figured I'd post some pictures because few people have probably been into this part
of the machine (and hopefully won't need to!).

I had found a document online (written by a Henry Arnett) which describes a procedure which I didn't use because I already had the machine on its back for scraping. His procedure removed the locknut on the sprocket shaft, then the housing for the shaft (2L-234) and slide the shaft into the column, allowing the vertical bevel gear and bearings to be removed once the locknut on the bottom of the machine is also removed.

On my machine, here the casting 2L225 has been removed from the bottom.



The view from the bottom of the machine. Interestingly, the casting was scraped to fit the machine machine base casting, with a gasket to seal it, and then lead was poured around the joints between this casting and the machine base and column castings.



Rear oil sump for the chain drive sprockets that normally would be at the bottom of the column.



Front end with bevel gear arrangement.



The whole casting with all the parts. Note the chunks of lead that sealed the gaps were quite thick in some places (1/2" or more).



I'm wondering whether to replace with lead, or some other kind of product (body filler?). What do you guys think? Whatever is used needs to stand up to cutting fluid and/or coolant. I might never run either, but I don't ever want to have to open up this area again!

I will of course use gasket sealer on the surfaces when they go back together.

Next step is complete disassembly and getting replacement bearings.

-Phil

P.S. I discovered how to post decent sized pictures again... at least on a Mac. If the picture filename ends in .jpeg, it will be compressed to a tiny size. But if they are .jpg, then are compressed to ~80kb or so, which is still a decent size.

bearings

Bearings for this are Fafnir 307K (rear) and 208K (front) for the horizontal shaft, and
Mcgill 7207-2 for the vertical shaft.

As a follow-up, the Mcgill 7207-2 bearing seems to be some rare item now, with a somewhat unique
pressure angle and/or preload setup. I've ordered non-Mcgill replacements (Federal 7207's) which
should be a 30degree contact angle. I'll reassemble the housing with the original shims with the
old bearings first, then check to see if the preloads result in the same mesh for the gears.

There was quite a bit of backlash in the gears, so I'm considering shimming them further to tighten up the mesh, but not sure about it.

Another picture of the parts, mostly cleaned up.



There's another matter... I scraped off about .015" from the face of the column and a few thou from the back of the knee to get the column face bearing quality and re-aligned to the ram dovetail and ultimately the spindle axis. Depending on how much play there is in the splined shaft, I may need to adjust the location of the whole assembly slightly toward the rear (to compensate for loss of material on column and knee backside).

That means removing two locating pins in the casting pictured.

How would people normally do this? re-drill new pin locations in other positions? Or turn/grind eccentrically offset pins for the purpose? Or just reassemble without the locating pins if it comes to that?

Thanks
Phil

If the situation allows it, I'd be inclined to drill and ream new dowel holes. But I don't know if it's really necessary in this case. Does the casting locate the two bevel gears positively, or is one gear located by the splined shaft alone?

Thank you for the photos!!!

Truly, I hope to never see the underside of my 22LU. But it is nice to know how it’s put together.


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sfriedberg said:

If the situation allows it, I'd be inclined to drill and ream new dowel holes. But I don't know if it's really necessary in this case. Does the casting locate the two bevel gears positively, or is one gear located by the splined shaft alone?

Click to expand...

The casting locates the horizontal bearings (and thus bevel gear).

Then the steel machined housing fits closely into the casting, and houses the pair of angular contact bearings for the vertical bevel gear and the splined shaft.

So that's a long way of saying Yes, it seems the casting locates both bevel gears and the splined shaft fairly rigidly. What I don't know yet is when the knee is at its lowest point, how much play does the splined shaft have?

-Phil

I put the knee back onto the still-horizontal column. Luckily the splined shaft still lines up well enough with the bearings, without needing to adjust the location (there's enough play in the splined shaft-to-tube interface).



You can see in the picture the gap between the casting for the feed drive gears and the main column/base casting. All the gap area was originally filled in with lead.

I'm going to use fiberglass reinforced body filler.

-Phil

Just wanted to add some more observations here in case some poor soul ever has to do
work on their VN22L like this...

I believe you can service these bearings entirely without flipping the machine over.



Cap 2L-246 fits over the cover 2L-226 and prevents removing the cover. On my machine,
the cover was screwed in place and lead poured around it to seal it. The cap 2L-246 was
also soldered in place on the splined shaft 22L-132.

So, it seems very possible to do the following:

- Heat the cap 2L-246 enough to free it from the splined shaft and slide it up.
- Remove cover 2L-226 (which may necessitate removing some lead sealing.
- Now remove the locknut and chain drive sprocket from the horizontal shaft. This allows access to the 4 SHCS which hold on the 2L-234 plate. This plate retains the rear horizontal shaft outer bearing race and has an oil seal pressed into it.
- At this point the horizontal shaft can be pressed out toward the rear, mine what somewhat of a tight fit. Unless you want to clean it out or replace those bearings, it only needs to move far enough for the horizontal bevel gear to allow the 2L-235 housing to be jacked out.
- Now jack out 2L-235 with long screws, IIRC 1/4-20. The assembly should come out in tact with the lower cover, the vertical splined shaft bearings, etc.

If you have the knee all the way up for this process, it seems likely the whole splined shaft, bearings, and housing 2L-235 and cap 2L-236 would slide up into the knee, and then once out of the base the lower cap, locknut, etc. can be removed, freeing the splined shaft.

At that point the vertical bearings can be serviced, replaced, etc.

In my case I replaced the McGill 7207's in there with MRC 7207's. They seem to work fine, no adjustment to the shims were necessary to have a good mesh with the mating bevel gear.

When reassembling I used gasket maker sealer between the appropriate parts. I also replaced all the oil seals. The seals were no longer available (they were Victor parts) but standard replacements sizes worked (Garlock or other).

-Phil

Thank you!


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Hi Brandenberger,

When you reassembled this, how did you lubricate the bearings (10207) and bevel gears (2L-247 and 2L-248)? It's probably obvious, but not to me.

I know that the 5852 and 10248 bearings are greased and can be greased via the zerk fitting in the housing. There is a seal on the shaft to contain the grease in the vicinity of those two bearings though. It's not clear to me how the gears and bearings down in the base get lubricated. They were not packed with grease when I removed them. Is the idea that grease gets forced through bearing 10248 and in to the cavity where the bevel gears mesh and down through the 10207 bearings? that seems like a long shot to me, but maybe enough would get through to supplement what is packed in there when assembling?

Also, I do not think my 2L226 cover was soldered to the base. It was painted on to it with lots of paint just like everything else on this machine, but I don't think I exerted enough force to break a solder joint to remove it. Maybe this has been taken apart before, but if it was it was prior to the very sloppy paint job.

** update ** was just cleaning it some more. There is solder there sure enough. I still don't think I broke the seam, but it was indeed soldered from the factory.

Thanks for any insight.

Did you look at the date when it was written? Dec. 2 2020. I hope he is still here. Click on his name and you can see the last time he wrote anything was Nov. 2021 You might find another Van Norman owner inside https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/categories/usa-heavy-iron.39/

I did see that it was an old post but figured I'd give it a try. I am not very familiar with using this software or forums in general.

I clicked his name and poking around it looks like he posted something last Friday?


But I'm probably not looking at it right. Thanks for the tip of somewhere else to look/post.

Your right. Hmm... Maybe he is looking, You may want to send him a Private message - I would repost this in the Heavy Metal section though as a lot of people own Van Normans. I have one. Im no expert like the others on them.

Thanks for the tip, I just posted the question there:

Hi,
On mine the grease zerk eventually forces grease into the lower bearings as well as bevel gear and the horizontal bearings.

However, I greased the bearings before assembly anyway, knowing the machine won’t get that much run time.

To reassemble rather than using solder/lead, I used body filler (bondo type stuff) after cleaning thoroughly. I used the fiberglass reinforced filler for the big gaps. Worked fine, once primed and painted made a good seal keeping out swarf and oil from above.