I tried to set the lathe to 510 RPM, but in that gear it seemed to spin up the motor, but not the workpiece/chuck. Several slower/faster gears worked fine so I didn’t have an issue.
Are there certain gears that require some trick? or should I have reported it as a yellow tag issue?
Occasionally some gears are a bit tricky. Getting aligned into the 45 (blue side when orange is at 510) took a little wiggling the last time I used it. My suspicion is that it’s due to big teeth for the slowest gear having fewer alignment points, but I haven’t actually seen how it works
One trick is putting the color selector arrow up to get it in neutral and sometimes manually spinning the chuck to get the speed selected.
“Certain gears”? Not really … all the gears are finicky, as they are on any geared machine without synchronizers. The same issues come up on the drill press and the Ring Fu mill.
You should expect to have to jiggle the spindle and gear handle to get into any gear. The middle two gears in each bank are a touch more tricky, since you can overshoot. Julie makes an excellent point that this is easier to accomplish when the gear bank selector is pointed up in neutral.