Vintage Windmill and Wind Generator Forum

Well I got the woodmanse home and mostly taken apart. Really not much there to disassemble, this one will probably be easier and quicker to restore than my F&W. I was scared the main shaft was broken as the wheel would spin without turning the gear. I stayed up till 10 pm to get the main shaft out. Turns out it's is just the key way was missing. There really is not much wear on it at all, with the exception of the pitman where it connects to the crank gear. Pretty heavy wear to one side, the other side still has babbitt. Shouldn't be too hard to fix, build it back up some the the babbitt should fill in the rest I imagine.

Nice work and the tower hardware was there. That is good.

The main shaft runs on Babbitt bearings and those were good?

Yup, has both the bed plate and trueing spider, although there are only 2 of the 4 trueing bolts. The babbitt on the bottoms of the shafts are just worn out, hasn't started eating into the cast or the shaft yet. The babbitt on the top sides look usable, but I'll just make all new ones. Seeing as this one has babbitt instead of wood bearings, I would assume it's one of the later models and not pre-1900 like I was hoping it would be hahaha

The pinion gear looks good.

I have a Butler open gear that came in three forms of bearings with the first in production being Babbitt, followed by (from memory here) bronze graphite and lastly Hyatt roller bearings. Mine was the older that came with Babbitt bearings. Like yours, the bottom bearings were worn from the weight of the wheel and the top ones were useable/good.

What I did was replace all of the bearings with oil impregnated bronze sleeve bearings that (like yours) had a top and bottom, so I ended up cutting the sleeve bearings in half for the top and separate bottom. My logic on this upgrade in bearings from Babbitt was so I wouldn’t have to climb the tower as much.

That sounds like a good idea. I'm assuming you can't just buy some in the right size, you'd have to mill them to proper size?

Very nice Thomas now you have two open gear mills in your collection.Gotta love those open gears!!!

There's just something about getting to see everything moving and working!

TdcJD wrote: ↑Sun Aug 13, 2023 8:34 pm That sounds like a good idea. I'm assuming you can't just buy some in the right size, you'd have to mill them to proper size?

McMaster-Carr has a good selection and no milling down in my scenario. Just cutting them in half vertically.
I practiced the cut on a regular bronze bushing that I had previously ordered the wrong size, as it was cheaper than an oil impregnated bushing to mess up on. If your pinion will come off, you might not would need to cut them in half and could possibly slide them on the shaft.

Attached is an example of what I used from McMaster-Carr. It was hard to locate any longer than 3” in length for my size so I went with 3” long ones. You might could find them cheaper elsewhere or I’ve had luck in the past on bearings and other parts NOS on eBay.
Did you see any evidence of a petrified leather shim in the red area or on the top part? Windy explained the shims to me when I asked on my windmill rebuild.
Leather shim like in the red area on this mill.

Ah okay, I'll take some measurements and give them a look! The main shaft is rounded over at the end so the pinion gear will not slide off. But I could use a Dremel to clean it up to slide off of I had too.

And yes I did see the shims. I assumed it was a gasket of sorts to help keep the oil from leaking out. I thought I woke able to use cork gasket to replace it.

What little I do know your pumping pitman is the later model. Mine has removable bearing caps on both ends with wood bearings. Yes their vanes are pretty straight forward. The Stover and Dandy vanes are similar.