Old Seneca Falls lathe

I found an old Seneca Falls 10" x 36" lathe. It's in fair to goo

condition, no rust except on the chrome handwheels. It has been store in a heated dry basement for 15 years. The only marking I spotted wa cast in the fron surface of the bed, and read "Model 20".

The head stock, the carriage and the tail stock were all snug an smooth.

The drive system looks like it is a complete cobble job. It was "trapeze" looking affair and fashioned from twisted and straigh v-belts, on a 2x4 lumber platform that the previous owner (no deceased) had apparently attached to his ceiling.

The whole "trapeze" contraption was leaning against a wall so I didn' see it run, but it apparently was reversible according to the curren owner, who had never run it in 15 years.

I've seen the info on

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but there isn't much detail abou the drive system, nor what tapers this lathe employs. Can any one th forum direct me to a source of info on this lathe so I can see what th drive train is supposed to look like

-- J. Mark Wolf

Reply to
J. Mark Wolf
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Looks like I'm not the only one who just became the owner of a Star lathe.

Can't help with the drive system, but have some comments on the taper. The lathes.co.uk site doesn't seem to mention the taper so I did a little measuring of my own last night.

The tailstock taper on my 9" Star is a standard Morse #2 taper. The headstock taper is a different story... it isn't a Morse, Jarno, or Browne and Sharp taper.

The taper is somewhere around 0.035 and 0.034. Best I could do using telescoping hole gages and a caliper to measure depth and diameter. The raw numbers look something like this: 1.000 major 0.917 minor 2.416 length. Those were quick measurements the other night trying to see if it matched any of the standard tapers so take those numbers as rough.

The previous owner made a sleeve adapter to use standard MT2 centers in the headstock. Others in this newsgroup have done the same.

Reply to
akushner

You won't find one site that shows what 'the' drive system looked like, because these were designed to be overhead lineshaft driven, and there are so many ways to skin that cat that work it's amazing.

Basically all you need is a countershaft bolted to something solid above or behind the machine, and a motor to drive it via a reduction. The reversing is now done by electrical switching of the motor leads.

The tapers IIRC may be Jarno on some of those machines, if not MT2.

Jim

Reply to
jim rozen

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