Old Lathe

Hello all,

I have searched the web for some information about a lathe that has been collecting dust in my basement since we bought our house. It appears to be manufactured by L.H. Dawson Machinery. The company used to be in Chicago but has been gone for as long if not longer than I have been around. Here are a couple of pictures of the lathe. Lathe Pictures Any information about the lathe would be greatly appreciated. A google search turned up this info on L.H. Dawson Machinery but had no information about the origin of the lathe. http://books.google.com/books?id=pLQAAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA94&lpg=PA94&dq=J.H.+Dawson+Machinery&source=web&ots=mknKSEO_i_&sig=XA3oIOS_j4z8yPiEGjwzZFihtp8&hl=en

Thanks a lot in advance,

Curt

Is The Reliable Lathe what is at the top of the tag on the headstock? That mean anything to anyone?

Yes, that is on the headstock, along with the usual decimal equivilants to 32nd's and 64th's.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Nice pics Curt. Click on your "parent directory" and see what comes up...
Did you buy the lathe or did it come with the house?...Bob

Note the 1906 book, an interesting find by the way, lists Dawson as a "merchant" rather than a manufacturer. In other words, Dawson fastened those nice cast nameplates to all the various machines they bought from various makers and then retailed around Chicago. It was a very common practice to persuade the customer to come back to the selling dealer when he wanted repair parts.

I have a very nice and huge catalog from Manning, Maxwell & Moore, another major dealer of that period. It is full of great pictures of all sorts of machine tools. Every picture has had the manufacturer's name erased from the printing cut before the book was printed. Even if I found a picture of some particular lathe in the catalog, I still could not tell who made it.

I was interested to see that Hardinge Brothers was not listed as a lathe manufacturer in that 1906 Iron Age directory, even though they were making their Cataract lathes before then. The directory is only of those companies who advertised in Iron Age magazine. Hardinge is listed as making "bench lathes" in the 1909 edition. These are neat books.

Larry

I would advise everyone NOT to click on the "parent directory" for the photos. Unless of course you want your computer messed up! May the fleas from a thousand camels infest the islamic software terriosts. Gary P. Hansen

Looks like most of the change gears might be there (that's the threading chart on the lathe, not 64ths). Is that a taper attatchment in the tray below? With enough love (work) it might be a pretty usable machine.

Looks like my webserver was hit again. It's fixed. The page that comes up is harmless by the way.

Did you buy the lathe or did it come with the house?

Click to expand...

It was in the basement of a house we looked at and eventualy purchased. I had them add the lathe to the purchase contract saying that they would leave it. No extra money to the price of the house but I WANTED that lathe. Now after 4 years the "Honey do" list is whittled down enough for me to get it running again.

I will get the lower tray cleaned out and get some picturesa of what's there for you to have a look at sometime today.

Similar to a seneca falls but not quite the same.

The threading plate is a ringer except for the lettering at the top:



a close-up:



But the SF machines had the reversing tumbler gears built into the headstock on
the left side. This one does not have the lever for them on the front. The Dawson
plate is I suspect indeed the retailer's nameplate, very common. See the "Garvin"
plate on my seneca machine.

Jim

Foot powered?

The way the bed is notched, the way the pan sits, and the leg style and position I would estimate that lathe was designed for foot power However no guess as to manufactured it.

The steady rest and bed shape resembles Seneca Falls, however the head stock feed reverse isn't like SF. The early SF lathes did have hand wheels, and a similar resemblance in some of the tail stock. But the legs are not like the early SF lathes. The early SF had a V gap at the top of the legs.

Early foot powered South Bend (1910-1915 circa) resembled SF lathes isn't "intimation the best form of flattery"

Ray