I'm now the proud owner of a lathe, and various boxes of junk/treasure that goes with it. It belonged to the father of a good friend of mine. Sadly he died between agreeing to sell it and completing the deal. Even worse the roof of his workshop had failed and everything was rusty/mouldy/mildewed (I did get a steep discount).
The lathe itself is from Warco, so it will have been a Taiwanese import, but fettled in and delivered from the home counties. It's small. 9 inch swing and 20 inch between centres. 3/4hp motor. You need to put it on a bench and it only weighs about 100kg. It is sadly rusty and in need of quite a lot of restoration. With the original owner being dead, it's quite hard to know what's what. There are boxes of tools and accessories, a lot of them damaged, and it's hard to identify all of them.
I think I've mentioned "yak shaving" before. You can't do job A until you've done job B. You can't do job B until you've done job C. Eventually you need to have shaved a yak before you can finish what you started. I want to use the lathe to make part of a catch tank. I need to use the 4 jaw chuck to grab the stock because it's too big for the 3 jaw. I need to use the dial indicator to centre the stock in the 4 jaw. I found dial indicator, it's clearly ancient and has been repaired many times over the years. It has got wet and seized but I managed to free it up. The "glass" seems to be homemade from acrylic and it has gone yellow and cloudy so that you can't actually see the needle. I found myself polishing a dodgy bit of acrylic as a necessary step in cutting some 4 inch aluminium tube. I wouldn't have been surprised if the polishing had had to be done with freshly shaved yak hair.
Richard "Mitutoyo" B
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