Need help with simplex 35 pr-1014 oil pump!

[Jay Brody]

Thanks Mark you’re a lifesaver! I’ll just break down and get a new one from them. I just want to bring this up to its glory days!

[John Eickhof]

the standard wolk gear failure! the head was probably sold by wolk...anyway i have replacement gears in stock...

[Dave Macaulay]

I suspect the pump was installed with the gears mashed together hard, compressing the plastic and eventually distorting it bigger. In too many XL rebuilds to count I have also never seen that. On installation the oil pump gear should wiggle a bit, some slack is needed. There's little torque on the pump... it's pumping into an open tube at close to zero pressure.
An XL needs not much oil circulation. The "spray-o-matic" lubrication seems ridiculous but obviously works pretty well. As long as you see some oil running down inside the glass it should be fine. Not unusual for the (tiny) reservoir to be pumped out in operation so air is sucked up by the pump and the pipe output much reduced... no problem, oil keeps draining back down and there's enough oil getting througb. Since there is no pressure lubrication and everything relies on this rather chancy oil supply, an XL will run a long time without damage if the pump fails. Trouble is usually from having the intermittent swapped and the dribble tube not repositioned to drip into the intermittent properly on reassembly... even then they can run years like that if lucky.
if you go into it further and fiddle with the constant speed sprocket assemblies, don't lose the tiny felt bits in the holes by the gears. These wick oil spray into the sleeve bearings.
And all gear engagements need a bit of backlash slop.
Avoid taking the intermittent or compensator apart unless something is wrong. Some compensator bearings are now very hard to find.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

the standard wolk gear failure! the head was probably sold by wolk

In 40 years and hundreds of Simplex's I never had a Wolk gear leave it's hub. Getting that part right in gear manufacturing is the easy aspect of gear manufacture. But I did have just about every other conceivable thing happen with his gears.. I'm sure you remember the Brenkert 100 gear fiasco back in the 1980's. When Don Markus took over he bought new CNC gear hobbing machines, and they sent Charlie's 1920's Barber Colman's to the junk yard. Don also hired a qualified machinist to see to it that the parts were made correctly. . He also switched to a black composite material of some sort for the actual gears and that stuff was the bomb. Those gears never wore out.... Don also manufactured DP-70 gate bands, lateral guide rollers and pad rollers for us. LaVezzi made custom 35mm VKF feed / holdback, and intermittent sprockets as well. I was rebuilding and servicing upwards of 50 DP-70's between Wyoming and Utah up until I left Claco. Then Digital came along and I ripped alll that stuff back out. I had a 12 plex, 8 plex, 4 plex and many more scattered about DP-70. Now, Wolk is gone and Al LaVezzi sold that company and they will no longer produce MP parts. That leaves Worrall Grinding in Anderson, CA as about the only one that can still make small batches of uber high quality sprockets.

[Randy Stankey]

I suspect the pump was installed with the gears mashed together hard, compressing the plastic and eventually distorting it bigger....

...On installation the oil pump gear should wiggle a bit, some slack is needed....

I vote with you on this one.

Delrin (or whatever that white, plastic gear is made from) is supposed to be dimensionally stable but only up to a limit.

At my work, they use fixtures made of Delrin to hold parts while they are being baked to cure the potting. We started finding fixtures that were warped and you couldn't slide the parts in and out without risk of damage. Come to find out that high temperatures, combined with continued wear of sliding metal parts in and out of the fixtures, all day long, was causing them to warp and wear out.

We have two sets of curing ovens. One for low temperature baking at 65 deg. C and one for high temp. baking at 125 deg. C.
Delrin is supposed to be stable up to 120 deg. C. There was a change in process specs which decided which parts got baked at what temperature. When people started putting those fixtures into the high-bake ovens, they started warping.

It wasn't until somebody took one of those warped fixtures to the engineering department to ask why all of them were warping that they looked up the temperature specs for Delrin and found the cause of the problem.

Now they are shopping around for a place to make new fixtures out of some other kind of polymer material that can take the higher temperatures. I forget what it's called but it's this chocolate brown material and management is bitching because it's almost twice as expensive as Delrin.

So, yes! I can absolutely understand why the gears on those oil pumps would warp, or get wallowed out if they are installed incorrectly or if they get too hot or both.

No, I wouldn't try to glue the gear back onto the shaft. Glues don't bond with Delrin very well. That's why they use it for those potting fixtures. In case some of the epoxy potting compound gets slopped onto the fixtures is can be scraped off with a wooden popsicle stick. Combined with oil, I wouldn't think that glue would hold up very long at all.

If it was an emergency situation where you had a projector go down on a busy Friday night and you needed to get it going just long enough to get you through till Monday when you could call for replacement parts I might do it as a "Hail Mary Play."

Since this projector isn't in commercial service and it's not a do-or-die situation, I wouldn't take the chance. If you patch it back together and it fails again you could do some real damage. Parts are getting more difficult to find, too.

Better safe than sorry. Right?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

On installation the oil pump gear should wiggle a bit, some slack is needed.

One thickness of notebook paper clearance between meshing gear teeth is my standard. Some times, depending on locating dowel pin accuracy, this can't be achieved. But it usually can be... and there are no dowel pins related to the oil pump ayway. The important thing is not to over tighten the connection of the line running to the top when that's hooked back up. If that is over tightened, you can actually cut off the oil flow by over compressing the brass ferrule... I have seen that done by a booth monkey before. Also, about 30 seconds after you start it up, the oil should be dripping down to the intermittent from the oil collector above it. You may have to frame the intermittent all the way down in order to see that oil drip. OIl should also be splashing on the rear window.