[heliflier]

hi guys , recently piced up this old lathe at a clearing sale and i am trying to find out what brand it is as i would like to do a bit of restoration on it and need to find a few parts
have looked at several brands like myford , south bend and others all have differances .anyone out there got any ideas ?
can add more pics if needed
thanks in advance for your help

[andypugh]

hi guys , recently piced up this old lathe at a clearing sale and i am trying to find out what brand it is

It has some fairly distinctive design elements. Any idea where it was made?
The control layout is more British than US.

You could look at all the Australian lathes here:
Australian Machine Tools Links

But I can't see it here, so perhaps an exhaustive search on the main list is needed.

[heliflier]

i dont know where it was made , the only history i know about it was a guy from Darwin bought it with him when he moved to South Australia about 10 years ago . Darwin has alot of histroy around world war 2 , could it be from around this era ?
it has an english made Burnerd chuck on it the only number on it is 056 stanped into the bed on the right hand side . there are no other numbers or words i can find anywhere
i have spent hours on the lathes uk site looking through different brands closest i can find is a portass brand , have also emailed the site owner , tony he said it was one he didnt recognise

[Al_The_Man]

. Darwin has alot of histroy around world war 2 , could it be from around this era ?
it has an english made Burnerd chuck on it the only number on it is 056 stanped into the bed on the right hand side . there are no other numbers or words i can find anywhere

I would think pre-WWII by the construction?
Machines that were used in the war effort, usually had a War Dept stamp, Under the British Commonwealth this would have been a vertical arrow.
The Broad Arrow
Al.

[LUCKY13]

I agree with AL, this lathe looks to be more of a WW 1 area (if not older).


The gap in the bed, and the bottom of the beds design are good clues to watch for on brand/builder. I have never seen the design myself and it really doesnt matter what it is. Just use it, repair it, and use it some more. AT its age, any parts are going to have to be built, or hand fitted from other lathes anyway. Although I understand, to be able to show its brand is a plus.


And again as far as parts, in this style of lathe its almost kinda of a wash(hopeless) to find parts ( unless it is something very comon). And just about anything it could need can be made from scratch, or modified from a nother lathe to fit. Gears in the spindle drive, spindle bearings become a problem though if needed. I would tear the spindle down/aparts and inspect,clean and ajust before even using it much. Many lathes of this design will have felt oilers in the spindle that should be checked,cleaned, replaced as needed. Doing some reading in the SouthBend section at the "Practical Machinist" forum could help with idea's of whats inside/envolved with working on the spindle. Even though its probably not a South Bend lathe, its design will be close to the older lathes SouthBend made. Infact they have a older machinery section there (PM forum)that you could post pics of your lathe and maybe get some better input of the maker of the lathe.


Either way this is about as simple of a lathe design as there could be. It will make a great lathe if keep in shape, and be very usefull in about any shop.

Jess

[holbieone]

it has to be one of these , there's a lot

lathes

[heliflier]

my main concerns with it are it needs a couple of gears , 1 is on the auto feed as its missing 2 teeth , i have found some myford gears that look the same on ebay but these have a 5/8 bore Which i guess they mean center hole , where mine are 3/4 . can these be bored out or are they hardened ? dont know if the pitch of the teeth would be the same either
the back gear ( which i probably wont use ) has 2 teeth missing from the large gear , and quite a few missing from the gear that runs with it , guess this will have to be remade ? will have to look into that

[andypugh]

my main concerns with it are it needs a couple of gears , 1 is on the auto feed as its missing 2 teeth , i have found some myford gears that look the same on ebay but these have a 5/8 bore Which i guess they mean center hole , where mine are 3/4 . can these be bored out or are they hardened ?

Boring them out should be easy enough. if there is a keyway then you might have to put on your "craftsman" hat and use a hacksaw and files.

dont know if the pitch of the teeth would be the same either
the back gear ( which i probably wont use ) has 2 teeth missing from the large gear , and quite a few missing from the gear that runs with it , guess this will have to be remade ? will have to look into that

You can probably identify the gear specification by looking at the catalogues here:
Outside diameter and tooth count should be enough. Knowing is the gears are imperial or metric would be a good start.

Individual missing teeth can be "repaired" by drilling a couple of holes, inserting some pegs, and filing to profile. It's not a proper fix, but lathe back-gears shouldn't see huge loads anyway.
There are ways to make gears on a lathe. This book [ame="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gears-Gear-Cutting-Workshop-Practice/dp/0852429118/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360922792&sr=8-1"]Gears and Gear Cutting (Workshop Practice): Amazon.co.uk: Ivan R. Law: Books[/ame] describes how. (Which was a disappointment to me, as I am much more interested in generating gears and there is no mention at all)

You may need to decide if you want to "Restore" the lathe, or just use it.
In the latter case you might want to swap the triple flat belt pulleys for a single V-belt and run the motor through a VFD, losing the elaborate overhead drive. I find myself stuck on the "Restore" side of the fence with old machinery.

The clues that might lead to identification are the shape of the underside of the bed, the english-style rectangular ways, the full-circle handwheels (unusual at that age) and the tailstock. Nearly every lathe of that vintage has a tailstock locked by what Tony at lathes.co.uk calls the "self-hiding-spanner" whereas yours has a much nicer locking method.

[heliflier]

thanks very much for your help , i should clarify a bit when i mean restore i mean just get the broken gears fixed and a few worn bushes on the drive which i will machine up , probably a paint job to tidy it up and some covers for the belts
this morning i got it working for the first time , replaced the flat drive belt , motor pulley and bought some cutting tools . seems to work quite well at this stage
i like the idea of getting rid of the over head pulley system , might look into that

[andypugh]

thanks very much for your help , i should clarify a bit when i mean restore i mean just get the broken gears fixed and a few worn bushes on the drive machine up

It's easy enough to insert odd teeth and file to shape. The gears are not actually highly stressed (they probably broke because some foreign object went through mesh)
And you can make bushes, you have a lathe :-)

[erniethepiper]

At least the legs are older than WW2. More like turn of the century or at least the 20's. The holes in the legs are for a treadle power and electric motors didn't take hold until the early 1900's I believe.

[john_at_wormcou]

I have a lathe of very similar construction, with the main difference being the tailstock. The headstock, bed and carriage are almost identical to yours. Here's the problem, I haven't been able to identify mine either. The only mark on the lathe proper is a small serial number (R114) stamped on the back flatway at the righthand side of the bed under the tailstock.
I have trawled through the site lathes with little success. Mine seems to be a mixture of Grayson, Warwick and Zyto in design.
It may be that we may have to strip the lathes back to bare metal to see if the original manufacturer's name has been chiselled off, as seems to be the most common way of rebranding the english lathes. BTW, mine is also missing a tooth on the bullgear which I'll repair after I have stripped it back and restored it.
Good luck in your quest.

[Coxsteve]

I believe what you have may be an earlier Mars Lathe made in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane which would fit in with original supply to Darwin due to logistics and transport back in the day as well.

Much of what you have seems very much like my Mars lathe except mine appears to be a very high spec model with power cross and longitudinal feeds as well as a fully cast stand with a plinth type at the headstock end with a storage facility within the Leg that even has a cast iron door.
Like I said Solid the whole machine weighs almost 900 lbs including the stand,Very capable machine for the era with the ability of almost 34mm hollow spindle bore in mine in a machine that appears based on a South Bend Design but improved in many ways,mine has a removable gap bed fixed by two machine scrfews designed to affix and locate at the same time.

Tony from Lathes UK has a couple of Later Mars lathes on his site but none like mine or your if as I suspect it is an early Mars product.

Much searching has so far only uncovered the Information on Tony's site and as well some old Brochures on Ebay a while back plus some shots from a machine exhibition back in the late fifties or early sixties in Brisbane I found on the net when searching.

Good luck mine gets weekly use at work where I decided to store it until I build a newer shed at home,I too have one gear with a broken tooth out of the Change gear set,I will measure the ID next week to see if it matches but I work across the road from a Gear cutter so that is no issue I will simply have a new one made for a good price because I know him and we occasionally have stuff made at work by him.

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