South Bend 9" lathe. Help identify

Hi guys. Help me out here! I saved this South Bend 9" lathe from being turned into a Pepsi can! I saw a diamond in the rough. Has surface rust and dirty but will look like new when done. Works great and appears completely untouched. Appears to be original bench in poor condition. I have found a couple drawings of the head with a cover but no information on an under drive with V pulleys. Found pulleys on Ebay at four digits. I question that! It has a four foot bed, 1 1/2-8 spindle thread, taper attachment, thread dial (removed in pic) and all the change gears and steady rest. What actual model is this thing and is the under drive V belt set up really that rare? I dated it with the serial at 1936. Bed was cast in 1935. 66669. Help me out guys!

We have a south bend forum here, which is probably a better place to ask, but yes, that is a relatively rare lathe. SB only made that style of underdrive for a couple years, and most of them were three step flat belts. This one also has a long bed, which is unusual.

allan

I think the wood bench/cabinet is also unusual. South Bend offered various sheet metal cabinet bases for their under-drive 9" & 10" lathes. Way back "in the day", the cabinets were sheet metal with steel tube bent into "U"'s for the framing and legs. This is the first time I've seen a wooden cabinet for an under-drive SB lathe. It looks like it might have been factory supplied.

A lot of oddities about this lathe. This lathe would be what South Bend called their "model C"- the most basic of their small lathes. Loose change gears and no power feeds, only half nuts primarily for thread cutting are in the apron. What makes this lathe particularly odd is despite it being a "Model C", it has a taper attachment.

Someone either ordered the lathe as it appears in the photos, or built a "Frankenlathe" out of South Bend parts from other worn/damaged lathes. Not an uncommon thing.
Why anyone would order a lathe with a taper attachment yet not order the apron with power feeds (Models B & A) is one of those questions which will go unanswered. To further add to the mystery surrounding this lathe, it has no thread chasing dial on the apron. Maybe this went missing as it is easily removed. A Model C lathe with a taper attachment might well have been ordered for a specific job, like cutting a tapered thread- but with no chasing dial on the apron, this may not have been the case.

SB did offer wood topped benches for their small lathe, but the wood cabinet is something that may be rare- or quite old. SB may have shipped the lathe with flat belt drive, and someone along the way swapped parts to convert it to vee belt drive. The lathe's history may be one of those convoluted things where the lathe started off ordered for a school shop (with that style bench and loose change gears), and went through a succession of owners who modified, swapped parts and took the lathe on a downhill spiral into its present state.

As Kitno455 says, the South Bend forum is the place to post your pictures and ask about your lathe. Plenty of us here own South Bend lathes and use them and know something about them, but the real mavens are on the South Bend forum.

This is a fairly unusual lathe.

I can NOT have a quick change gearbox because of the peculiar setup for the underneath drive. My
co-worker actually had a machine like this (no wooden cabinet base however) and this was SB's initial
foray into underneath driven 9" machines. These were all loose gear change type, although my friends
was, I believe, a model B which power crossfeeds.

Hopefully you have all the change gears for this machine.

Another one

It's funny you should post this today. I just noticed this one on CL Vermont.
I'd never seen that style headstock pulley cover before. Is the Vermont lathe underdrive stand original?
It's got a fair amount of tooling with it.

South Bend Metal Lathe 9" Model C - tools - by owner - sale

Headstock pulley cover looks just like mine, as does the lathe bed. Serial 94xxx, 1939

You saved a CAST IRON lathe from being turned into an ALUMINUM Pepsi can!? That's hilarious.

I should have added it does have the thread dial. I removed it when I started cleaning it. I took it to a guy here in town that worked at South Bend lathe and first thing out of his mouth was "this one is odd!"

jim rozen said:

This is a fairly unusual lathe.

I can NOT have a quick change gearbox because of the peculiar setup for the underneath drive. My
co-worker actually had a machine like this (no wooden cabinet base however) and this was SB's initial
foray into underneath driven 9" machines. These were all loose gear change type, although my friends
was, I believe, a model B which power crossfeeds.

Hopefully you have all the change gears for this machine.

Click to expand...

Yes I do have all the gears

This is the original bench on the OP's lathe. AFAIK, all of these early underdrive 9" machines were on that wooden cabinet. The bench on the Vermont CL lathe is shop-made.

SB abandoned this style of underdrive pretty quickly, as it prevented mounting a quick change gearbox, which came out in 1939. At the time this lathe was built, the 9" workshop SB was only available with loose change gears and no power feeds. It was definitely an artifact of the depression, as the other, heavier 9" lathe had quickchange and power feeds.

So, it looks to me that this is the most expensive of the entry level SBs from that year.

allan

Just to drag up an old thread [emoji1787]
Note the 4 oilers on the headstock.... I'm yet to pull the spindle to see if all 4 are functional.

Sent from my VOG-L09 using Tapatalk

Here are a couple of pictures from an old magazine that I posted in another thread that I will look up later.
The one with the cabinet looks similar and I see the date on the other one is 1936.
Jim

Serial says '41, so look on page 26 in this '42 catalog for reasonably close

http://www.wswells.com/data/catalog/100B/cat_100B.pdf

Maybe the extra oilers were installed right after they found out there were no spindle bearings - the spindle just runs in the cast iron of the head stock