some more photos

looking down from the top. You can see the remains of where the cam lobes were. Still need to make the plate spacers and spacers for the gears so they don't rub on the plates.

I'm going to cut out the areas that are marked so I'll have a bit more room to clear the pulleys and gears on the lathe. I'll also drill holes down from the top to oil the shafts.

this shows kind of where this one will sit and you can see that I'll need to cut some of the plate to clear the lathe's pulley and the lathe's gears. I'll use the same way to mount this reducer to the lathe using just one bolt. This speed reducer has been a lot easier to build. I hope it will cool off some it has been nasty hot working in the shop. Not to long ago I was whining about it being too cold.

Ray

The speed of the motor is 1725 rpm. The ratio from the motor to the first pulley is 4 to 1. The pulley on the lathe to  feed the speed reducer is 2" outside dia. My input pulley on the first speed reducer is almost 3" in dia. The first speed reducer would slow the spindle down to 58 rpms. I can't put on a larger pulley due to running out of clearance between the 2 belts on the speed reducer so I made the second speed reducer with more room between the 2 shafts.

The gears are all from small engine timing gears. Small gears are off of the crank shaft, large gear is the cam shaft.

Using the first and last gear  is a 2 to 1 ratio the middle gear does not matter it's just a spacer gear, to get more room between the in put and out put gear and for proper rotation on the out put shaft, so now I can make a larger in put pulley to slow the speed down more than I could on the first speed reducer. My first speed reducer was to see if I could make it work and not interfere with the lathe's parts. I didn't put those gears in a straight line with each other. I wasn't sure I could make it fit, now I know I've got the room so instead to tearing up the first speed reducer for the gears I'm making a completely new gear train using a 3hp gears and a 5 hp gear. The first reducer was all 5 hp gears.

 I'll be happy with around 40 rpms once I'm done making this. The other route to slower speed is using a variable speed motor which I don't want to spend the money on.

This is the way I did the first speed reducer

this is the second speed reducer gears

No, using the second gear's shaft on the back side for the out put shaft it's turning the wrong direction. That is why there's 3 gears I want the same rotation going in and coming out. Can't have the shafts come out of the back side.First off doing it that way the belts won't line up plus the mounting block for the speed reducer covers up the second gears shaft.

Ray No problem

The first speed reducer looks nasty, but works,  I wanted to make it look a little better and easier to make, plus go slower.

The slowest this lathe will run is 150 rpms using the stock pulleys.

All of the shafts need to be on the front of the speed reducer so the lathe's pulleys will aline with the speed reducer pulleys.

This newest speed reducer has more clearance between the shafts so a larger pulley can be fitted to the speed reducer on it's in put shaft so the lathe will turn slower than the 58 rpms that the first speed reducer turned.

this is the first speed reducer at 58 rpms.

I use a link belt you can make the belt any length you want. Got the belt at Harbor freight bout $20.00.