How I slowed down my lathe, Optimum 3008G

hi guys um this is my live uh Optimum 3000 um I've had it for about 5 years now and the one thing that's uh driving me nuts a little bit was that the slowest speed could have been a lot slower as you can see here the very slowest speed is um 125 um RPM and I'll just turn the machine on just so you get a feel for that speed it's quite fast and you know I was wanting to do some machine tapping on my life and that speed just it's just too fast so I wanted to slow it down and um the I ended up slowing it down and what I did was I just um Extended the pulley on it so I'll just show you in a minute I'll take the this side cover off and um I'll just show you the pulley system there and what I needed to do to slow this thing down I managed to slow it down to um it's about 67 RPM so it's pretty close to half so I'm pretty happy with that so I'll just put the camera down I'll get this cover off and I'll just show you the the what I needed to do so I got the side cover off and um and you can see here now it's a um the two-speed system going up to the um spindle gearbox so you got low it's on the low speed and that's the high speed but what I've done to make it even slower I've made that into a three-speed now so it' be low medium and high and what I did this is how the machine came from the factory the actual as you can see the the spindle is actually doesn't protrude all the way through to the pulley which actually worked in my favor so what I did I um made myself a pulley I just go get it I made myself a pulley that actually slides into that and it's a nice nice sliding fit there's no play in that and um what I did I um I cut a little keyway into this which lines up with this one down here so I just um get this little key put that in and now I put this pulley back on and that is a really good fit and having that key there it's um gives it good drive good strength and then obviously I just put a bol TI in there and hold it together and then up on the other pulley it had a ress here so I made another pulley which is this one here that recess fits inside there which centralizes the pulley and I went I went to a maximum size the biggest I could so that just sits up in there and as you can see there's not a lot of there's about 3 mil Gap in between the pulley and the spindle and um and I just drilled and tapped three holes into the original pulley to give it the strength so that's what I've done so so as you can see now it's gone from a TWP speed to a three-speed and um I'm going to put the camera down bolt this back up together and then I'll show you the the speed that it's operating at now okay so I've got it all bolted back up I've left it which is now um the medium speed right which was the original low and what I'm going to do I bought a little rev counter and um what I'll do it like it says the manufacturer says the low speed is 125 so with the rev counter um I've run it and it's about 120 121 RPM I'll just put the um camera down again and um and I'll get the rev counter the r the way the r cter works it just picks up it just picks up on this reflective strip just there it picks up on that reflective strip just there right so anyway I'll put the camera down and I'll get the Rev canner out this is the Rev canner that I bought off eBay it's pretty cheap but I just did it just so I can just see what the um RPMs are now with the new low speed and um turn machine on on its low speed which is D and [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] L so as you can see it's 120 RPM [Music] and now what I'll do I'll go and change the um the belt put it on its new low speed and then we'll put the the RPM Taco meter and that will check it out okay just back in a sec so there you go I've uh moved the pulley out to its um a new low speed I'll just turn it [Applause] on works really well and um that there is a lot more manageable speed now if I was uh machine tapping I'd be quite confident to work with that speed anyway I'll turn it off um I'll remount this camera and then um we just verify the RPMs with the Techo meter okay just one second all set to go 67.8 so it's pretty close to Haring the speed uh so I'm really happy with that and it's working really really well so thanks for watching guys any comments I'm happy to to read okay see you