Reeves Drive on JWL-1236 Jet Lathe

Don't Try This at Home

This is fair warning! Do this at your own peril. Compressing springs is dangerous! This worked for me, but I probably just got very lucky, and didn't get a spring shooting into my eye. Maybe someone out there has a better idea to share.

Reeves Drive Woes

The Reeves drive on the lathe allows you to turn a lever/knob to adjust the lathe speed. There are two pulleys, one on the motor shaft, and one on the spindle shaft, that each have a fixed side, and a inter-meshing movable side, so that together they form a variable diameter pulley. The spindle shaft pulley's inner side moves with the lever action, and a spring on the other motor shaft pulley allows the outer side of it's pulley to move, keeping tension on the belt.

I noticed that I couldn't make the speed any higher than about half way before the spindle would loose power and wouldn't go any faster. After reading posts online, I decided to try to take it apart to see what was going on. The motor shaft pulley's movable side wasn't sliding freely past a certain point, so the the diameter of that pulley stayed too small to allow the speed to increase more. The belt would just get very loose on the pulleys, until the spindle wasn't even turning any more.

The movable pulley on the motor shaft is held on by spring trapped on the shaft end by a 5/8th" retention/snap ring. To remove the movable section of the pulley, I removed the belt, and moved the pulley as far to the right as I could to relieve the spring pressure as much as possible. Then I pinched the spring with pliers while I removed the snap ring. So far so good. I took the spring and pulley off and cleaned the shaft, and scrubbed it with steel wool. I took a piece of fine grit sandpaper and rolled it up and stuck it in the pulley hole and lightly sanded the inside a little. This was enough to get the pulley sliding freely again on the shaft. I didn't use and oil or grease since that would just seem to make the shaft gum up easier with fine dust particles. Now the fun part: putting it back together. How does one safely compress the spring enough to get the snap ring back on? I tried various methods, but the spring was too strong and these all failed. I finally came up with the contraption in the pictures below. I used a clamp and a piece of maple to extend the clamp over the end of the shaft and hold the spring end securely. It work very well, I was very careful and cautious so that nothing felt like it was going to SPROING out of control on me.

This is just a 12 inch Jorgensen bar clamp with a piece of Maple slid over the bar. I had to file off the bar stop-tabs to allow the handle end of the clamp to slide off temporarily, while I put the wooden piece in place.

I drilled out the section in front of the spring retention area a little to allow more space to get the snap ring on, while still providing support from surrounding wood.

The trick was leaving enough wood in front of the spring, so that it wouldn't break under the pressure, while still leaving enough room in front of everything to get the snap ring on. The extra thickness around the spring on the back side helped bolster the retaining section, so it wouldn't break as easily. Using thinner wood over-all failed as it would just snap off under full spring tension.

At least now I have a way to service the darn thing if I need to do it again in the future.