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Where are all the 10" LeBlond Regal lathes?

Galane

Hot Rolled
Joined
Dec 6, 2010
Location
Idaho, USA
I have a line on what's supposed to be a 10" LeBlond Regal, haven't seen it yet. Been trying to find information, pictures, video of them but other than the "artistic" images from a 1930's catalog on lathes.co.uk have found exactly nothing. No 10" LeBlonds on ebay or youtube.

What's the spindle bore? Plain or ball or roller bearings? I'd like to find out more information than they were made from 1930 through 1946 and after that the smallest LeBlond made was a 13" - before driving 305 miles to go look at it.

If you own a 10" LeBlond, let's see some pictures and specifications, please!
 
Look at Tony Griffith's site, "Lathe Archive" for more information. The first Regal made was 10" swing, and was offered with either quick change or loose change gears. Plain bronze bearings were used in the headstock. The 10" Regal was offered in either bench mount or with floor legs. I only saw one 10" Regal years ago, in an electric motor service shop. It was bench mounted, and had the quick change gearbox. It was a solid looking lathe, but I remember distinctly seeing the plain bearing caps on the headstock, and the "humpback" headstock design (cast housing was enlarged around the spindle bull gear). I believe LeBlond only offered the 10" Regal with the threaded spindle nose. Most of the older lathes never had the large spindle bores/ I have a 13" "Roundhead" Regal built in 1943, and the spindle bore is 1 3/16". My comparison, my South Bend Heavy 10" lathe will take 1 1/4" bar stock thru the headstock spindle with no problem.

What you will likely find with the 10" Regal is it will have relatively low spindle speeds, small spindle bore, and threaded spindle nose in some thread used only by LeBlond. I'd make sure there was at least a 4 jaw chuck with the lathe, as you will have to machine your own backplates if you want to add other chucks (or faceplates). I'd try to inspect the lathe under power as the headstock high-speed (primary reduction) gears in the Round Head lathes were on the lighter side. If you can open the headstock, so much the better. There is likely a handwheel on the headstock input shaft (outside the belt guard). Turn this handwheel over by hand, trying the lathe in each spindle speed. Feel for any roughness, excessive backlash, or signs of broken gear teeth. Under power, if you can try running the lathe, you should be able to hear noisy gearing and any kind of "snick" or "click" of damaged/broken teeth. This will be a sound with a regular frequency to it.

You can do the usual checks for bed wear: turning the carriage clamp (binder) screw in lightly with your fingers with the carriage up by the headstock. Try cranking the carriage towards the tailstock. If it gets harder to move and then jams, you know the bedways are "saddled" or more heavily worn up by the headstock (common on older lathes). A little wear is OK and will not be noticed unless you were doing toolroom or gauge work. The main thing is to be sure everything works, and nothing is broken. After that, check for all the loose parts (if the lathe has loose change gears) like change gears, chucks, faceplates, steady rest, etc.

I think LeBlond discontinued the 10" round head lathes sometime in the late 1930's or early 40's, prior to WWII, when they brought out the 13" and larger Regal lathes. The little 10" Regals are not all that common, so if you find one, you have a fairly rare lathe, IMO. I think you will find many similarities with the next series of Regal lathes, such as in the apron, but the headstock is unique to those 10" lathes.
 
According to Tony's site (I found the page with pics of a nicely restored 10" which looks very good) the pre roundhead 10" was discontinued circa 1945-1946 and postwar the smallest swing LeBlond made was 12". Going by a lot of web searching, 12" didn't last much longer. I found several 13" and much larger numbers of larger swing diameters.

Other than those pics on Tony's site I've found no pictures of the 1930's through WW2 10" LeBlond. Mostly got wore out during the war then scrapped, or just scrapped when the new roundhead design was introduced?

Looks like LeBlond felt the sub-13" lathe market was overcrowded after WW2 by South Bend, Logan and others so they just chose not to compete in the toolroom and HSM field.

If you own a 10" LeBlond, post pics of it.
 
Have you searched here on this forum? I'm one of the amateur-experts on LeBlond Regals who hangs around here. Over about 15 years on here, I think we've heard from the owners of approximately three of the 10" Regals. There are several threads with questions and pictures. Your basic answer is that they are very rare. I wouldn't be surprised if there are less than 10 of them left in the world today. They are nice machines, as all LeBlonds are. I've seen one up close, that a friend here in California owned. A high quality 1930's era benchtop lathe.

The 10" and 12" Regals were of the first generation design of Regals. We've sometimes called them the "Lumphead Regals" because of the big lump on the top of the headstock casting. The "Roundhead Regals are the second generation design, introduced in the late 1930's. We don't know when they stopped building the 10" Regals, but it appears that they kept building the 12" Lumpheads in some limited production through the 1940's, even the larger models had all gone to the Roundhead design.
 
Its getting harder to find good used iron. So much of what I have looked at has been used and not seen much care during that use. The good thing about older iron is it was built with longevity in mind so rebuilding is always an option. The down side is rebuilding costs have gone up drastically, so revving that old iron is quite a financial under taking. Then you also need to factor in transportation cost. With almost everything new being CNC, there aren't many companies producing quality manuel lathes or mills, they all come from offshore. What other options are out there?
 
If they're that rare, then the only way I'd want one is if it's in good working order with good spindle bearings and no critical parts damaged. Getting the bronze bearing inserts redone with lead-free Babbitt should increase the RPM capability, no?

I tried searching the forum, but like any online database search it doesn't grok terms like 10" A search here (or anywhere online) for 10" LeBlond is pretty much a futile exercise.

There ought to be some way to customize the indexing here for that, given that the " mark for inches is rather critical to talking about lathes, especially American ones and old British ones.

I assume there are ways to create custom lists of words to ignore, like the, a, an, and etc - and custom lists of strings that *must* be indexed like 6" 7" 8" etc. If the forum software has those features, it only takes the willingness to take the time to compile the lists and find the forum software settings to activate their use instead of a blanket no-index of all "too short" words.

I've been using and fixing computers for 30+ years and could go on at very long length about all the WTH/WTF things I've seen that shouldn't have been done with software and hardware. There's also been a ton of "Why didn't the programmer/engineer/designer do this *simple* thing? I'd only save time/money/material or make it easier/cheaper to produce. More durable and easier to service too!"

Old lathes seem to have plenty of that. ;)
 
What other options are out there?

I confess! I've been looking at a Chinese made 13x24 "Bolton" gear head lathe with a 1.5" spindle bore. The same exact lathe is sold by several other importers, including JET. 'Course JET is always double or triple the price for the same machines. It's not made by Sieg, they don't have one like it on their site.

Fixing up the old iron is fun and entertaining and can sometimes be profitable, but I really need a lathe with a large bore spindle I can *use right now* without first having to take it all apart and repair whatever is broken.

The import is a bit lighter than a comparable dimension old American bench lathe, but I'm not going to be doing the sorts of things that'd strain a lathe to its maximum, and I have a 7x14 that I've used since circa 2001. Not the Sieg Industries model, the other, much better built version, often imported by startups who later switch to the cheaper Sieg lathes.

For some years I've been thinking off and on about ways to almost completely automate the production of lathe components from welded assemblies of steel plate, including stress relieving, grinding, boring etc. Essentially put steel plate in one end of the factory and take out finished beds, headstocks and tailstocks from the other end to assemble into ready to use lathes. Harley Davidson does that with frames for their V-Rod motorcycle. Tube and plate goes in one end of the line and finished frames pop out the other end, without a human hand touching anything in between. Saw that on a Speed Channel documentary on the motorcycle, no commercial interruptions, sponsored in full by (IIRC) Yamaha. Or was it Honda? I busted out laughing when I saw who was paying the bills for the show. ;)
 
I do not think there would be as large a market for lathes as for HD's! Good luck in supporting such a lathe mfg. facility. Also, remember, steel does not dampen vibration as well as good old cast iron.
 
Lathe beds & headstocks made of fabricated steel are nothing new. The method was used on some very heavy duty high production lathes by LeTorneau. The problem with any weldment is post weld stress. The frame of an H-D is lighter material, and an automated, sequenced welding procedure is used to minimize or control this post weld stress. On something like a lathe bed, heavier steel plate would need to be used. This requires more weld, to get full penetration welds. A process such as GFCAW (gas shielded flux cored wire) would likely be the choice. Once the bed or headstock was fabricated, it would then need to go into a stress relieving furnace. After stress relieving, probably a shot blasting to get it cleaned for rough machining. After rough machining to within probably 0.030" of finished dimensions, back into the furnace for a final stress relieving.

LeBlond, on their later lathes, got the best of both worlds. They built the lathe beds out of good iron castings, and used hardened steel replaceable bedways. These bedways were precision ground. We have a 25" x 96" NK series LeBlond (wide bed, heavy duty) and a later 15" "square head" Regal at the powerplant machine shop. Both have the replaceable bedways.

The other property which cast iron exhibits is great dimensional stability and great vibration dampening. It is an ideal material for lathe beds, headstocks, and other parts. One pour and a bed is cast, no cutting multiple parts, jigging them for welding, welding.... With today's "burnout molding" (using rigid foam patterns), a lathe bed or headstock could be cast without needing to make a bunch of dry sand cores. I believe the Chinese are casting their machine tool beds and milling machine mainframes for Bridgeport knockoffs using this process.

With any automated welding process, it comes down to accessability for robotic welding. Something like a lathe bed, with multiple "girths" (cross bracing) would be a bit trickier to get into for robotic welding. On the other hand, foundries are well automated. My wife bought a bacon frying pan that was on sale, mainly because it was made in USA. It is a "Lodge" brand pan, and they have a website. They have some youtubes of their foundry, and the degree of automation is amazing. I am sure that for cylinders and heads, H-D uses an automated casting line.

What I have noticed in the Chinese casting used on some of their machine tools is that they lightened the castings. Instead of casting heavier sections, they tend to go lighter and thinner. In addition, they use a lot of thin ribbing. The surface on the unfinished sides of these parts has me thinking they are using the burnout molding processes for some of the parts. I think the Chinese are also using an alloy of iron and steel ("semi steel") with a lot more scrap steel in the melts. This gets the tensile strength up, and lets them get away with thinner castings.

The old line US Machine Tool builders poured iron from cupola furnaces (melted with coke), usually reclaimed from scrap (such as old engine blocks, old home heating boiler sections, busted machine parts...). If they used any scrap steel, it was a much lighter percentage. The result was an iron that was much more dimensionally stable and had the better dampening properties. Then came the matter of "seasoning" the iron castings. Most machine tool builders got their castings in a run from the foundry, and stored them outdoors. Some manufacturers deliberately let the castings sit outdoors in the weather for a couple of years. The belief was that this "relaxed" the iron and made it more dimensionally stable.
Automobile engine manufacturers did this same thing. The business of "just in time" manufacturing was unheard of and could not be done if "seasoned iron castings" were going to be used. The machine tools builders probably knew their business was cyclical, and might be "feast or famine". As a result, they probably always had enough castings out in their yard for making a run of lathes or other machine tools. I think if you were to call Monarch and ask them to make you a new 10EE toolroom lathe (assuming you had six figures in your checking balance), Monarch would be using castings poured in the 1970's or early 80's. I know when the "Cole" was heavily damaged in Yemen, her machine shop was damaged as well. The Navy put an order in for a new Lodge & Shipley lathe of the same model/capacity as what had been in her original machine shop. The group (Lucas Precision at the time) which owned L & S made a new L & S lathe for the Navy. My guess is they used castings they'd had sitting in the yard from when L & S was producing lathes on a steady basis.

My own engineering opinion is that nothing equals a casting for a machine tool bed. It is my own sense of the dampening and stability inherent in a casting. I think Brown & Sharpe tried building some precision grinder bases or beds in the 1980's using welded fabrication vs casting. B & S was said to have resorted to a vibration process to "align the molecules" for stress relieving. How many grinders were built this way and how they held accuracy is something I never found out.

I've seen the differences between weldments and iron castings on hydroelectric turbines and generators and on other heavy machinery parts. Each has their place. Weldments just do not have the same properties as castings, no matter what advanced design methods or manufacturing processes are used. Once high tensile strength iron came onto the scene, it changed the whole picture for castings. Castings are used where forgings and weldments were previously used. With improved foundry methods and high tensile strength ductile iron, it is often more cost-effective to go to a casting. One pour and a lot of fitup/welding or machine work is eliminated.

I took H-D's factory tour at their York, PA plant in 1984. Interestingly, I had been at the then Allis Chalmers (now Voith) hydro turbine plant for the week previous. A-C was already using robotic welding and robotic finishing (robotics using ari grinders to finish contoured parts of the hydro turbines). H-D was building the frames using humans to put the pieces in jigs and manually weld the parts together (GMAW or MIG). In 2006, I picked up my certification as an American Wleding Society Certified Welding Inspector. One part of the exam was the practical. It required candidates to examine a number of specimen welds and identify the process used, position the weld was run, and direction of travel, aside from identiftying "indications" (porosity types, undercut, underfill, crater, etc). I had always made a game of inspecting any welds I saw, whether on a structure I was walking thru (like an airline terminal or building), or on anything else I came accross. When I got my 2005 HD lowrider, I could see by the welds on the various parts that it was welded automatically. HD came a long ways in 20 years. But, at least on the air cooled engines, H-D was still using cast cylinders with iron sleeves, looking like a sand casting.

Each process has its place and each manufacturing process and material have specific engineering properties. Manual machine tools will likely never be a high production item like Harley Davidson motorcycles (which, as motorcycles go, are are probably have fewer built each year than most other mfrs). The manual lathes left in production around the world seem to have clung to the use of castings, and I think it is a combination of the properties of castings and manufacturing costs. I am an oldtimer in my tastes in machine tools as well as powerplant equipment, locomotives and motorcycles (Airhead BMW's for 40 years, the HD was an unexpected newcomer) and so much else. My opinion is based on over 40 years of experience, but I will also say I am biased and often base my opinion on my own gut or sense of things as much as "running the numbers". One thing I do NOT base my engineering on is cost. I am fortunate to have my niche where I can live by "Heavy is better" and reliability and longevity usually come ahead of first cost. If a powerplant turbine is down on an unscheduled or forced outage, the penalty charges and costs of replacement power rack up so fast that anything, no matter how much more the first cost is, will be thrown at the problem. As long as the bean counters are held at bay (bean counter = some corporate types with MBA degrees who look at financials first and the main objectives second), this kind of engineering flies. Once something blows apart or s--ts the bed during a time of peak power demand, that is when the bean counters get blamed and told that if they listened to the engineers up front, we'd be making money hand over fist instead of paying through the nose and then some. Of course, the bean counters get their bonusses, and the engineers at the plant get penalized for the lost generation.

With machine tools, I think the design philosophy in the USA was to build it to last, and build it rugged. The Chinese seem to have taken the basic designs and leaned them out, doing it on a "thumbnail". The claim is computer modelling allows for lighter "tuned" castings or somesuch. This is probably the bean counters looking to sell machine tools for the highest possible profit. The reason the older classic US Machine tools were so good and lasted so long was due to the fact that no one skimped on the castings. IMO, it is that simple. Rugged castings= rigidity, stability, and good vibration dampening.
 
i'm one of the proud few 10" regal owners on this board. i seriously lucked out on mine and it was in almost new condition with literally not one ding on the ways and with factory paint like it just rolled of the pallet. mine is on the original cast base sans coolant tray.
leblond couldn't even date mine based on my serial # (on the tail stock end of the ways) but said it was probably made btwn 29' and the early 30's.
the nose is indeed threaded, it is a super rare 2 1/8"-5 thread, tapered by about .025" or so and i can pretty much promise you that unless you luck out you wont find a damn thing out there for it so making your own work-holding solutions will be necessary. i lucked out (again) and mine came with a nice 10" 4 jaw and a fairly well clapped out 5" 3 jaw, i have since turned 2 4140 8" face/back plates and do as i need with those, one with t slots and one with a few drilled and tapped holes. biggest limit on these machines is the lack of size on the spindle through hole, at a measly .75" there's not much you can pass through there but i make it work. spindle speeds range from 30-525 but there are guys out there who run them faster with good results.
not fast enough to make good use of carbide but HSS with a proper grind can really wake one of these little machines up.
i will say this, coming from the SB world (previous early manual gear change 9", toolroom 9 and heavy 10 owner) if in comparable shape these lumpheads will run circles around any SB out there in it's class. The ease of changing speeds and feeds, power crossfeed, threading dial, carriage locks, not to mention the rigidity compared to anything else in it's class, and of course the aesthetics of it, just a MUCH better machine in my humble opinion.
i would say mine weighs in at around 600 lbs or so with the base.
i LOVE mine and am truly a leblond convert now and am officially on the hunt for a 16-20" lumphead now, but will never ever sell this one. truly a work of art.
if you need any specifics please feel free to email me as there isn't much out there and i had to learn the machine just on trial and error, for instance it took me a year to figure out that the 'sliding gear' was on the left side and i was missing half of my feed ranges. surface finishes have improved drastically since that day..haha
i have the original owners manual in PDF form and will email it to you if you need.
 
The black one is Dennis Turk's. The light gray one was for sale on Boston CL a year or two ago.
 

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"If they're that rare, then the only way I'd want one is if it's in good working order with good spindle bearings and no critical parts damaged. Getting the bronze bearing inserts redone with lead-free Babbitt should increase the RPM capability, no?"

No. The top speed rpm is dependent on bearing diameter. The larger the diameter, the lower the top speed, but the more load the bearing can take. If you want a nice small lathe with a good top speed, look into a South Bend 10L.

"Fixing up the old iron is fun and entertaining and can sometimes be profitable, but I really need a lathe with a large bore spindle I can *use right now* without first having to take it all apart and repair whatever is broken."

A common fallacy spread amongst the import crowd. I have had the nearly unused 12x36 asian lathe at work apart no less than three times fixing it. Pin in powerfeed drive pinion fell out (not tapered pin, just a straight pin, so it worked itself loose. I staked it, so we'll see how long it lasts) requiring apron to come off. Backgear spindle locked up twice and had to be removed and re-worked. Turned out they had put too long of a setscrew in the oil port and it was dragging when the spindle heated up. We'll see what goes wrong next. I have spent FAR more time repairing new asian junk than fixing broken stuff on old machines. Also, once I fixed the old US machinery, it is FIXED and you don't have continual work stoppages due to some other stupid engineering error.

Now, having said that, before I'd mess with any asian junk I'd be looking for a 12 or 13" Regal, preferably a square head. In terms of floor space, it will be only a few inches in all directions bigger than a SB 10 on a factory cabinet. It will be the same size and maybe smaller than the asian junk. Top speed of 1200rpm, long carriage, excellent rigidity and power out the yang. I ran one at the pump shop I worked at and absolutely loved it. Only down side is that the drive gears in the high speeds are small and sometimes broken, so you need to both run it and visuallly look inside and check for missing teeth. If you find one and need an explanation of which gears are suspect, holler. They are common as dirt, so you are not looking for a supe-rare piece that you can't find parts for.

A big factor in your selection of machinery will simply be what is located close enough to you and what comes up for sale. Instead of setting your heart on an exact model, just keep in mind the parameters you require for your work. When a machine comes along that meets all or most of those parameters, you can ask around here as to how it is regarded.

Trying to find an exact model of 60-80 yr old machine tool will be an exercise in frustration and will waste a lot of your time. Machine tools were built in numbers of often only a few hundred total over twenty years or more of production. You usually just have to take what shows up close by that meets your needs, especially if you don't live in New England, Ohio, or Michigan.
 
I agree with Mike C. The Asian imported machine tools just do not have the feel of an older US made machine tool. A brand new Enco lathe a friend bought seemed sloppy and poorly made, even when compared to an old and worn Southbend Heavy 10" lathe that I have in my own shop. I agree that if you are hunting for a particular machine tool or a rare old machine tool, you can well be too feeble to drag it home and use it, if and when it does appear. I have a saying: "All of life is a compromise". IOW, if what you get comes close enough to what you want to work, shut up and grab it. If you learn how to follow this adage, you will often discover that what came along, while not exactly what you'd envisioned, sometimes works out better than you ever imagined.

Here is a case in point of how I came to get my own LeBlond 13" roundhead Regal lathe:

I set my sights on a roundhead Regal 13" lathe about 5 years ago. I saw them pop up on ebay from time to time. Two ebay offerings came along in close proximity to me. Here is what they were and why I ruled them out:

-13" Roundhead Regal, seemed to be in fine condition. For sale by a used tool dealer in Schenectady. Had long taper spindle nose (desirable), fully tooled, including Sjorgen collet chuck. 3 phase motor. No chip pan, no taper attachment. Asking price was 1900 bucks. This listing stayed on ebay for months. (75 miles from my house)

-13" Roundhead Regal, seemed to be in good condition, for sale out of a working machine shop down in Peekskill or Mahopac, NY (85 miles from my house). 3 phase motor, long taper spindle nose, fully tooled, with chip pan, no taper attachment. Asking price was 1200 bucks. Were it not for the lack of a taper attachment, I'd have jumped at this lathe.

No Roundhead Regals seemed to come into sight for a year. A Colchester engine lathe came up for sale near me for 600 bucks. It was reasonably tooled, but it had issues in the apron. It did not feel like a US machine tool and something inside me would not let me pursue that COlchester lathe. The seller was begging me to buy it and get it out of his shop (he had a new Jet lathe waiting to take its place). I did not want to start chasing parts for a 40-odd year old Colchester apron, on top of all else. I resolved to wait for a Round Head Regal, just wanting to have a classic piece of older US iron in my shop.

Then, a few weeks before Christmas of 2011, I was riding in the cab of a diesel locomotive on our tourist RR. We were running a Christmas special, free to the public. A volunteer on our railroad showed up and asked if we could help a disabled young man up for a cab ride. We did. The fellow who'd brought the disabled man along is an automotive mechanic in our community. We got to talking. He turned out to have been formally trained as a machinist. He mentioned he'd come into a load of fine old US made machine tools and brought a bunch including a Hendey 16" toolroom engine lathe, B & S mills, grinders, and more to his shop. I asked where this mother lode of machine tools was, and he told me. He said there were lots more machine tools there, and told me it was the estate of a sometime automobile junker. One thing led to another and I contacted the son of the deceased machine tool hoarder. When he let me into his father's building, I was overwhelmed with what was still packed in there. As the mechanic had described, there was one fine geared head lathe jammed hard against an exterior wall, with the tooling hanging on the wall above it. I climbed into the tangle and found a 13" x 42" LeBlond Roundhead Regal lathe, WITH taper attachment, fully tooled, and a single phase 1 1/2 HP motor. The condition was good to excellent. The only downer to it was the threaded spindle nose. But, the lathe DID come with a 3 jaw chuck, 4 jaw chuck, drive (dog) plate and 12" face plate.... The seller wanted 700 bucks for the lathe, and the lathe was within 30 miles of my house and no rush to get it out of there... Needless to say, I did NOT stand on my pre-conceived requirments of wanting the long taper spindle nose. I grabbed that lathe. It had everything else I'd wanted, was in nice condition with light wear on the ways, and not abused. Were I to hang out and wait for "exactly" the lathe I wanted, I'd be a long time waiting, or maybe have to travel a long distance or pay a lot more for it.

The bottom line is that old US made machine tools are out of production, you can't even order a new one if you wanted to. We have to take 'em as we find 'em and if what we find is close to what we wanted, grab it. I remember thinking after I'd passed up the first two roundhead Regal lathes in my area that there might not be another one to come my way. At that point, when the mechanic happened to tell me about the mother lode of old machine tools he'd lucked into, I knew I had to check it out. I also knew that if the geared head lathe was anything that fit my general parameters- i.e.- able to be rigged down into my basement shop, smaller footprint, classic US iron, geared headstock with roller bearings... I'd grab it. So, if the lathe turned out be a Standard Modern or Economy/Rockford, or something like it, I would have grabbed it just the same. This LeBlond Round Head Regal that I got even has extra change gears for metric threading as well as steady and follower rests. A lot of the original "frosting" is visible on the ways and dovetails, and the gearing in the headstock is crisp and good with no damage. Under power, the lathe sings nicely, no grumbling from the gearing.
My only reason for wanting the long taper spindle nose was that if I wanted to run in reverse for certain boring bar work, it would have been handy to have the chuck positively locked to the spindle.

I got my wish for a Round Head Regal lathe, and it took a combination of waiting and not jumping too quickly on some other lathes, and knowing when to jump when one was close enough to what I wanted. I agree with Mike about the square head Regals. I've used them in shops many times. Great machine tools, and enough high end RPM to run collets with small diameter work, and carbide tools. I think the Round Head Regals proliferated compared to the humpback heads.
The squared head Regals probably had several times more of them made than the total number of round head Regals. The only thing that put me off of hunting down a Square Head Regal was the rigging into my basement. A square head Regal also has electromagnetic clutch and brake, and I wanted to keep things basic and simple, since this is a home basement shop lathe.
 
Joe, the squarehead I ran had no electric brake or clutch, just a switch lever on the headstock and carriage for the motor. That must have been a late model option.
 
HPIM0805.jpg


The black one is gt2ride. Here is a pic before paint
 
Joe Michaels:
As always, and excellent read. In speaking of HD, I had the opportunity to tour Mercury Marine's plant 17 in Fond Du Lac, WI. This is where HD has the sidecovers and heads diecast. I was there talking with the engineers about the trials and tribulations of running a Wolniak die-caster-they had 13 of them up to 800 ton. He heads and sidecovers had some interesting 4 and 6 piece dies, and they utilized salt molding for the heads. Some was automated, most was manual. Very interesting process.
Joe
 
gt2ride- if you mean the the black one I posted about, I apologize if I had that wrong. That is a nice looking lathe.
 
My three biggest requirements for a lathe I'll keep are 1. 1.5" spindle bore, 2. ball or roller spindle bearings, 3. not too frigging long/heavy.

More than 24" between centers is going to be too huge for my shop. Looking on ebay and used machinery shops, most everything American over 10" swing with a 1.5" bore is also too long. Plus too much $$$ even if it is located in the machine tool encrusted eastern portions of the USA.

It has to share room with my spin casting equipment (150lb gas melting pot, mold vulcanizer and spinner), 48" box break, AC/DC welder, tools, more tools, yet more tools, small Chinese 12 speed drill/mill... I also have a really old Globe single post hydraulic lift in one of the two bays of this old service station, which used to also be a distribution site for gasoline. The shop bays have really high ceilings to accommodate trucks.

I'm planning on selling my 1940 10x24 Montgomery Ward and the 1967 9" South Bend (3-1/2 foot bed) and my Chinese 7x14 to fund the purchase of a lathe like what I want. If there's enough left over I'd like to get a small knee mill. Don't need a hulking giant one, just one with more capacity than the drill/mill, which has been problem free since I bought it new in 2001. Crazy thing with that, I plonked it down on top of an old steel pharmacy cabinet with a Formica top, didn't bolt it down and it hasn't moved the slightest bit! 470 pounds tends to stay where it is put.
 








 
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