Rick,
Your noise appears to be slack meshing of the changewheels, I had similar when I got mine. I spent some time over the weekend checking on mine & adjusted the backlash using the 'paper' method to achieve a closer .003" gap on all the changewheels & it has definately improved the noise level,bear in mind thjat the sheet metal changewheel guard will amplify any sound as it is virtually an 'empty steel box'.
I initially did as Jason described & started from the motor, belt off, no undue noise, belt on, nothing untoward from the spindle, preload in both cases seems to be ok, chuck spins a couple of revs before stopping itself when spun manually, set the backlash & ran the machine up through the slow speed range 50 – 1000 rpm & it is much quieter so I would remove that element of noise deduction.
If you go back to the original thread 'Warco family' you originated you will see a snapshot of the 'paper' backlash setup I did.I'm not saying that all this family of lathes are perfect,some will be better that others,( Monday a.m & Friday p.m. syndrome as we used to say about our car production line) & Jason's 280 sounds to be the bees knees. One point I did mention in the other thread I noted that there is some axial slop on the change wheels ..on mine, this will have the effect of the teeth not running parallel with each other for each wheel.so there will always be some noise from this direction, I meant to measure the difference in ID & OD but 'forgot' so will have to do that in the near future. If I can get my head round doing a similar video in the future I will post it on other 'Warco 250 &WM 16 family' thread, then we won't be looking at different threads & we Warco family geeks won't be jumping from one thread to 'tother.
BFN
George.