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...Photo...Engine Lathe Work...Lake Wales, Florida...1953...

lathefan

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...Photos...Engine Lathe Work...Lake Wales, Florida...1953...

...click on photos for full size...

...Curt G. Joa Inc... employee, Charles Straucle...manufacturing machinery for paper industry...



... employee, Henry Brinkman...

 
Can't tell what brand of lathes they are from the photos, but can tell that they are fossils, even though it was 1953.

The first photo has a good shot of the ubiquitous Lima motor drive we see so often on cone-pulley machines. I have three of the damned things, one mounted on my late 'teens Cincinnati Lathe and Tool 16" lathe, another exactly like it on the Gooley-Edlund mill, and a more modern version from the WWII era on the Bliss punch press. Things are about bullet proof. Read somewhere the gear box was essentially a Model A tranny. Whatever the provenance of the gear box, those units are dead quiet in operation. Both the Cincy lathe and mill only emit the soft whine of the electric motor, and the "flup-flup" sound of the leather belt.

Some of the older Lima units had a metal hand wheel, while most were of Bakelite. I think the Gooley-Edlund has a metal one, whilst the Cincy is Bakelite. Very often the wheel is broken on the phenolic version when found nowadays.
 
Got to looking closer at that first lathe, and noted that it is of the sliding bed type. There is a gap in the bed just below the chuck. There is also a lever on the sliding bed below the saddle that is perhaps the locking/clamping mechanism. Also note that the saddle is configured for placing the tool right up to the edge of the sliding bed end, there isn't any way "wings" forward of the cross slide dovetails, while the rear wings are longer than normally seen on a conventional lathe.

I also noted from the photo, that some idiot oiler lost the pipe cap to the oil fill tube on the Lima drive. There is a rag stuffed into the pipe.
 
The first lathe is a Smith Drum sliding gap bed lathe. Their tailstocks are 'backwards' with two locking nuts accessed from the back side. This one appears to have the factory wrench on one nut, and perhaps a short-handled shop made one on the other.

allan
 








 
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