That was my first lathe. Properly engineered and made, parts are available - a batch of long cross slides, fixed and travelling steadies and tumber reverse parts has just been made. They come up often on ebay and I've seen some really nice ones go for a gentle price (including long bed and "admiralty" versions with power cross slide). If you have a Myford built version then it's even got vee belt drive.
Charles
It's still doing very nicely, thank you!
Cuts about 0.5 thou off parallel over 6", so there's just a little bed wear. One of these days I'll scrape it in, but it's fine for my purposes just now.
For "made" read "cast"... The rest of the process is left as an exercise ... but it's all good practice.
The travelling steadies aren't back in production yet, since none of us have gotten around to making a pattern for it... one day soon...
For about half the price of a new Chinese machine you can get a reasonable example. One thing to watch is that you get a full set of changewheels; these can be hard to come by, unless we can get enough demand for a Cynical Trader to make a batch...
Quite a few old lathes have support groups, on Yahoo Groups, "drummondlathe" for one, Raglan and others have their own too.
Whether an old machine is a better deal or not is a long running debate ... I'd say yes for someone who already knows lathes, though a new machine must be less of a gamble for a complete beginner, provided the dealer's backup service is up to scratch.
- Brian
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