0t---Craven earning its keep

Ah how sweet! It's a baby Craven, doesn't even have a seat on the toolpost.

That'll be from around the 1940's and still going strong. I worked on one like that one were the guys were turning a rubber mill chilled iron roll around on the overhead crane. They made the fatal mistake of turning the roll in mid air over the lathe bed instead of moving it out of the way first. The ropes snapped half way through the turn dropping a 5 ton roll right onto the bed in between the pedestals.

Nobody got hurt but the lathe bed was broken in half ! The company sent it away for welding and then re-machining. I worked on it years later and you could just see were it had been welded because the cast iron weld was a slightly different shade of grey to the rest of the bed. Apart from that it was perfect. As far as I know it's still working away somewhere !

Regards Tyrone.

What they are doing would be illegal here....but sounds like its in Ireland......Every engineering text book once had a picture of a giant Craven with a 20 ft or so faceplate ,and a dozen guys standing on the bed.

john.k said:

What they are doing would be illegal here....but sounds like its in Ireland......Every engineering text book once had a picture of a giant Craven with a 20 ft or so faceplate ,and a dozen guys standing on the bed.

Click to expand...

Nah sure they try to make everything not legal here....i used to do repairs to threads, make new, replace stubs, repair spider hubs, brake work etc a whole lot of truck work.
we were NSW roads approved place of work, we also did tailshafts and more.
only thing we did not touch was heat treated Front steer stub axles, we told them to buy new.

Also the axles here have camber on them that one does not.

I dated each item i did i never had any returns for faults..

Thanks for posting the youtube of remachining the truck axle journal and threads. It looks like the Craven lathe was painted ages ago, paint over oil paint without any surface prep. Peeling puke green paint, possibly a DC motor drive, and working away.

Some time ago, I chanced upon a youtube of the Qadri Group, an engineering works in Pakistan which claims to be the heaviest machine shop in Pakistan. The youtube of the main machine shop floor of the Qadri works shows a number of British built heavy machine tools all at work: Butler planers, Craven Lathes, Craven gear hobbers, and some other machine tools such as a large Shiess Froriep vertical boring mill (German made). The machine tools all appear to be clean and the shop is well lit and clean. They claim to be able to handle work on the vertical boring mills to 100 tons weight, and seem to be mixing state-of-the-art CNC machine tools, CAD and other modern design software, and coordinate measuring machines with the use of the older manual machine tools. One clip in the youtube shows what looks like a gas turbine spindle with its blading out on the shop floor, and other clips show large jobs being machined in the Craven lathes.

It is quite a contrast, when we compare the Pakistani truck mechanics and Pakistani blacksmiths , as well as the youtubes of rural villagers starting and using Pakistani clones of Ruston-Hornsby diesel engines to the youtube of Qadri Group's shop.

Another interesting youtube from India, which has probably been posted here, is the "Dawn" machine tool works, showing their newly manufactured planers. These are basic planers which use flat belt drives and belt shifters to move the table on the cutting stroke and gig it back. Kind of like they are evolving their industries and are at the point where we were over 100 years ago. In the same countries, high tech manufacturing and state of the art manufacturing methods are used in some industries, while others are about 100 years behind the curve.