Waltham Lathe

Hello, I'm a Watchmaker and it was suggested that I post my lathe here to see if anyone recognizes it. As far as I can tell, it is an early 20th century (1920?) lathe from the American Watch Tool Co. in Waltham, Mass. My guess is that it may well have been a lathe from the Waltham Watch factory. It came with many accessories, including the cutter and thread follower to cut threads in pocket watch cases. This is currently the best lathe I own, and is daily use in my shop. It is also the largest, with a bed of 22 inches. Thanks for any and all feedback!

Cheers
Rob

You have a treasure. Those lathes are of limited use without the now obsolete tooling and the fact that you are well equipped makes it far more usable. My first lathe was a similar pattern lathe marked "W.W.Co." which I believe stood for Webster Whitcomb. I did quite a bit with it including some limited milling.

PS. Could you post some more detailed photos of the countershaft setup?

Your AWT lathe model could be determined if you would provide the body diameter and thread specs for its collets. A circa 1915 Hardinge collet list includes a number of AWT lathes, called Whitcomb in the list. See if you can find your collet listed.

The AWT larger (like yours) bench lathe business was sold in 1917 to Wade, while the smaller Webster-Whitcomb, Magnus and Elect lathe business was sold to F. W. Derbyshire.

There was no Webster Whitcomb Company. Webster-Whitcomb was simply a lathe model (trade mark) of the American Watch Tool Co.

The American Watch Co., later called American Waltham Watch Co. and finally called Waltham Watch Co., was one of many customers of AWT. And AWT had competitors who also supplied the same customers as AWT. To claim a particular customer owned your lathe, you need to have supporting documents or an owner nameplate or stamp on the lathe. For instance, I have pictures of a Derbyshire Magnus lathe with a Hamilton Watch Co. brass tag pinned on.

AWT/Derbyshire info: http://www.lathes.co.uk/derbyshire/

Wade info: http://www.lathes.co.uk/wade/index.html

Larry

The collets are pitch 20, according to my American pitch gauge, and the body of the collets are just under 15 mm. There are no other name plates or tags anywhere that I can see. The diameter of the thread for the larger chucks is 37.5 mm.

Rob,

You may want to checks Tony's website in the UK:

http://www.lathes.co.uk/

Look under American Watch Tool & Wade. Wade bought out American Watch tool in 1917 and continued making 7" precision lathes with the American Watch tool logo.

Very nice lathe with all the accessories, very hard, if not impossible to find these days. Do you have the gears for the chase thread cutting attachment? I have a number of this type of lathe I use for a clock-making hobby.

Joe

Hello, this link might help: http://www.lathes.co.uk/waltham/
Best wishes,
Tony.

Outta Time said:

The collets are pitch 20, according to my American pitch gauge, and the body of the collets are just under 15 mm. There are no other name plates or tags anywhere that I can see. The diameter of the thread for the larger chucks is 37.5 mm.

Click to expand...

They're 20 threads per inch, right? Probably either 3AT or 3C collets. Give the body diameter in thousanths of an inch. They
would be about 0.628 or so.

Larry,

Do you know who would have made a lathe with "W.W.Co." cast into the headstock?

It came out of the old Waltham Watch factory so I wonder if it could have been made in-house, since the guy I got it from said that it and a bunch of similar ones had been used for various production tasks before being stored in a back room. At the time they were still making the aircraft clocks in a section of the building, while the rest was leased out to various firms. I worked for a while at one of those firms and the building was interesting in its own right. It has since been converted to apartments.

jim rozen said:

They're 20 threads per inch, right? Probably either 3AT or 3C collets. Give the body diameter in thousanths of an inch. They
would be about 0.628 or so.

Click to expand...

The Hardinge collet chart in post no.3 shows the lathe is probably the AWT Whitcomb 1898 model No. 3, which has a .590" (14.99 mm) body and 20 TPI buttress thread. The No. 3 lathe was still being made by Wade after AWT ceased operation. I have read that the AWT collet is virtually identical to the Schaublin W15 collet.

Hebel-Bohrreitstock Drilling tailstock Has W15 collet dimensions.

The 3C and 3AT collets have 26 TPI V-threads, by the way.

Larry

Scottl said:

Larry,

Do you know who would have made a lathe with "W.W.Co." cast into the headstock?

It came out of the old Waltham Watch factory so I wonder if it could have been made in-house, since the guy I got it from said that it and a bunch of similar ones had been used for various production tasks before being stored in a back room. At the time they were still making the aircraft clocks in a section of the building, while the rest was leased out to various firms. I worked for a while at one of those firms and the building was interesting in its own right. It has since been converted to apartments.

Click to expand...

The watch companies made some of their own machines, but such machines probably had no maker names. For instance, I have seen a number of lathe parts stamped only "STD" that I was told came out of the Elgin watch factory. Ambrose Webster and Charles Moseley both worked for American Watch Co. making machines before going off to separate companies to build machinery for any of the many watch and clock factories that existed in the mid-19th century.

If you look at post # 6, you will see that Tony wrote, in his article on Waltham Machine Works, "...[FONT=&quot]confusingly there was also a Waltham Watch Tool Company, who produced a similar high-quality precision bench lathe badged [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Waltham Watch Co...."

Getting back to the AWT No. 3 bench lathe in post #1, Cope's lathe book has an AWT ad that says they designed that lathe for American Watch Co. (later called Waltham Watch Co.), but sold many of them to other companies in the USA and abroad.

Larry[/FONT]

Scottl said:

Larry,

Do you know who would have made a lathe with "W.W.Co." cast into the headstock?

It came out of the old Waltham Watch factory so I wonder if it could have been made in-house, since the guy I got it from said that it and a bunch of similar ones had been used for various production tasks before being stored in a back room. At the time they were still making the aircraft clocks in a section of the building, while the rest was leased out to various firms. I worked for a while at one of those firms and the building was interesting in its own right. It has since been converted to apartments.

Click to expand...

FWIW..... there may be another option to the "WW" I have an early Wade #8 that is marked as Walter Wade Lathe Co. I think that I had seen a post on here, that had mentioned that Walter Wade was building lathes marked as such, just before he purchased the American Watch Tool Company. The Wade #8 was then discontinued, and the Wade 8A was born. I have plans to start the restore shortly.