Logan 400 Lathe

110 volt, works good, very little wear. Has 6" and 4" 4 chuck jaws and threaded jacobs chuck.Lantern style tooling, homemade steady rest, dead centers plus other tooling (see pictures). Back gears and feed all work well. Looking for $900 OBO Smithsburg Md 21783

Considering condition, I would say the asking price is optimistic. Is there a stack of change gears? If those are mia it will further deflect price. Cute little lathes, best advertised to the hobbyist market.

"Hobby" is a little cold...... they are not "A***s", but surely best suited to a model shop, or light repair shop type use. Same stuff the S-B were sold into.

The 400 are indeed the smaller 18" c-c x 9" swing, so they are not "real Logans" quite.......

Maybe with some Aloris tooling it might come closer to the 1200 asking price.
The internet opened up a world of these machines, before, it might have brought it.

Look at the chart on the inside of the door over the change gears and make sure you have one of all the gears listed and two 16 and 32 (I think) gears. I see this lathe is V belt drive, better than the flat belt ones although you can put "rubber" timing belts on them inside out and this makes them grip better and run smoother than the leather flat belts. Also this lathe uses the half nuts for turning feeds, not just threading, so there is the potential for more wear on them and the leadscrew. Not a big deal for most if you keep them lubed. But I too think $1200 is a bit high. My guess would be $7-900 tops.

JST said:

"Hobby" is a little cold...... they are not "A***s", but surely best suited to a model shop, or light repair shop type use. Same stuff the S-B were sold into.

The 400 are indeed the smaller 18" c-c x 9" swing, so they are not "real Logans" quite.......

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I started as a teenager with a Logan 400 identical to this one and used it up into my professional career until I got a 14 1/2" South Bend, later a Sheldon and Monarch 10EE. The 400 is marginal for anything beyond hobby work where production rate is not important. They simply lack the rigidity and the bearings print ball patterns on the work. I did a lot of good work on mine but only because I learned to work around its shortcomings. I don't even regard it as a good lathe for a teen to learn on because operations like parting will be so difficult.

Bill

I sold a Logan 200 a year or so ago here in the Houston area. No QC gear box but it had all but 2 change gears. The half nuts were re-manufactured so very little slop in the bed travel. Had bed and saddle wear but everything was clean in original paint and everything worked as it should. Couldn't come to a conclusive sale until I ended up trading it for a generator and $175.00

Sometimes wish i kept it but I've still got the Logan 820 in the garage, a SB 9", SB 10L, and Delta Rockwell tool room lathes (not counting our bigger engine lathes)... so the floor space was worth it.

I lowered the price. Is there a better place to advertise it ?

I don't know... Possibly Craig's List or some hobbyist forum, at no more than $5-600.
If you want to get $1-200 out of it, clean out most of the rust with steel wool and paint thinner, kerosene, or similar non-corroding fluids, and take better pictures after removing at least most of the clutter.

I second the fact that, without a complete set of change gears, it is not a very attractive deal.

Paolo

9100 said:

I started as a teenager with a Logan 400 identical to this one and used it up into my professional career until I got a 14 1/2" South Bend, later a Sheldon and Monarch 10EE. The 400 is marginal for anything beyond hobby work where production rate is not important. They simply lack the rigidity and the bearings print ball patterns on the work. I did a lot of good work on mine but only because I learned to work around its shortcomings. I don't even regard it as a good lathe for a teen to learn on because operations like parting will be so difficult.

Bill

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Now that you mention it, I believe the bed is narrower and thinner than the 200 series, or similar. So I can see that.

Possibly your 400 did not have zero clearance bearings.... That makes parting off impossible, and is rather chattery on regular turning. Logan sold me a C3 replacement for mine, and it really made the model 200 impossible to use. for anything. I am sure the 400 would be no better with the wrong bearing.

After that got fixed.... Cutting off is not an issue on the 200, and I have never seen a ball pass print. I do not suppose that would be a standard characteristic of the smaller model 400 either. I stand by the idea that it is a perfectly usable small machine without big drawbacks for small work in modelmaking, or repairs.

That said, around here the 200 would go for $800 with QCGB and power feed, $600 with change gears. So I;d think $400 to $500 here for the model 400.

Anybody serious about buying it would want to know the condition of the ways. They need to be cleaned off and decent pictures shown. Right now it looks pretty questionable. Now, if the ways really are bad, you won't get good money out of it regardless. OTOH, if the thing is in good shape, just covered with light rust and crud, it might be a good buy.

JST said:

Now that you mention it, I believe the bed is narrower and thinner than the 200 series, or similar. So I can see that.

Possibly your 400 did not have zero clearance bearings.... That makes parting off impossible, and is rather chattery on regular turning. Logan sold me a C3 replacement for mine, and it really made the model 200 impossible to use. for anything. I am sure the 400 would be no better with the wrong bearing.

After that got fixed.... Cutting off is not an issue on the 200, and I have never seen a ball pass print. I do not suppose that would be a standard characteristic of the smaller model 400 either. I stand by the idea that it is a perfectly usable small machine without big drawbacks for small work in modelmaking, or repairs.

That said, around here the 200 would go for $800 with QCGB and power feed, $600 with change gears. So I;d think $400 to $500 here for the model 400.

Click to expand...

At one job I was burdened with a lathe very similar except for having powered cross feed. I don't recall the model number. The bed was the same as my 400 except for being a little longer. They bought it new and it was as bad as mine, which my father also bought new. The spindle bearings were ordinary ball bearings spring loaded with a spring washer. I was making concave mirrors for experimental spectrophotometers, machining them with a radius cutter I made and polishing them with a lapping machine. After a few minutes they looked like a Japanese flag with a sunburst pattern. My guess is that each time a ball passed a loading notch the spindle moved axially by a small amount.

As a teenager I used to wonder why I couldn't perform operations I read about. At first I blamed it on lack of experience and skill. Later I got to use a real lathe and found that I could do these things as well as anyone.

Bill

None of them are FOR that..... they are all quite reasonable 0,001" accuracy machines. definitely NOT mirror makers.....

But, "ordinary" ball bearings? There is a series made with belleville spring loading, but the bearings are better.... not the same class as in a 10EE, but were never meant to be. You might get away with some things using an SB due to the damping of the oil bearing.... ball bearings do have some problems.

But, the 10" Logans are perfecly credible machines, IMO, for a lot of things that may be needed. As good in general as SB, many Sheldon, etc. Not better than. Still a machine with suitable features and performance for a lot of maintenance shop, model shop, etc operations.

It sounds as if you were simply expecting more than the machines were ever intended to do.

But, I do not have part-off issues, and I rarely have any finish issues.... but I do not expect optical tolerances from a machine never intended to hold them. I've made a lot of prototype stuff, repair items, fixturing, test fixtures, etc, with Logan and similar machines. Perfectly usable, and fine when not asked to do what they wre not made to do. "Light industrial" would be a decent description....

I'd enjoy having a 10EE instead, and it would work far better, but any one I'd want to afford would likely have "issues" compromising its performance.......

BTW.... AFAIK, and I have seen both models, the 9" "400" and the various 10" machines use beds which look similar, but are of rather different dimensions.

I agree that the 400 bed will be smaller. My 200 and 820 were dimensionally the same and I even have an 850 turret lathe cross slide and saddle which fit both machines, but they were all 10", whereas the 400 everything is scaled down for the 9".

As far as the machines usefulness, IMO a machine like that is definitely in a "hobbiest" class of machines by today's standards, but I've seen OEM literature promoting 47l45/cr4f75m4n in a production environment, I think even that little 400 could have been put to work in it's day-n-age, provided the work was within it's swing and material removal range. Not saying it's my first choice, just that it could be done. I think it's like a standard of living. There was a time where people were happy without satalite TV and cell phones, now you "have-to" have them. My dad says 'hard times make a monkey eat red peppers,' that little lathe could be the red peppers to someone's little RC business or motor repair shop. At least they'll have a better chance of finding parts than with an import lathe.

For a while I owned a 9" SB, bought to complete a trade. I mounted it on a 1/2" steel plate large enough to cover the lathe and motor mount's footprint. The difference between that and the other light lathes was dramatic. In WWII the government published a procedure for improving the performance for such lathes pressed into war production. They recommended a concrete pedestal with studs for the lathe.

Re optical service, the spectrophotometers admitted light through a 1-2 mm slit, bounced it off a diffraction grating, and used an optical imaging device to focus an image of the resulting spectrum on a similar slit, giving a narrow beam of light of the desired wavelength. The resolution wasn't anything like that required for a camera. Since the two focal lengths were similar, a spherical mirror worked well. There would usually be some astigmatism because of the offset between the entry and exit slits, but it wasn't enough to be a problem in our service. The mirrors were basically low F number light buckets.

I never had a chance to run a 10" Sheldon, but I knew two people who had them and both rated them well above the smaller Logans and SBs. I think it is mostly a matter of the smaller lathes being made to a price and simply not having enough mass, as witnessed by the performance of the one with mass added. The absolute worst loathe I had to run was a SB light 10 mounted on a wood bench. The larger SBs I have run were still cheap lathes, not comparable to high end machines, but quite capable of serious work.

A shop I do electrical work for has a Mori Seiki. An item on my bucket list is to think up a project that has to be done on it so I can have an excuse to run it. Meanwhile, for many years I had the 14 1/2" SB on one side of the shop and a 15" Sheldon, the same model as Ray Behner's, on the other, 1600 pounds vs 3400, much longer cross slide and carriage, completely different worlds.

Bill

here are the ways cleaned up no rust it was basically gummy oil and dirt. The lathe was a retired machinest's home machine and hasnt been used in 20 years.

The steel plate is a good idea. I have also heard of poured 3" concrete benchtops for similar machines.... OR you can get the machine you really need, and never look back......

I picked up a little Logan 1400(newer version of the 400) a few years ago, mainly because I kind of wanted the challenge of working on smaller parts so I needed a smaller machine. It does what its supposed to, I have the change gears, but quite honestly they are a pia to fool with. I've pretty well decided to just fit it up with a tap and die holder for any type of threading, its just easier.

OP, put it on the local CL, $500-600 asking price is about right.