Rockfish,
I spend more time hand working with the carriage handle than autofeeding so a left hand wheel puts you more in the firing line.
If you are on auto with a L/H lever it's only for a moment whilst you engage it.
Again a simple fact.
It wasn't until a conversation such as this came up on one of the groups that I realised there is a difference.
I have 4 lathe, two are R/H and two are L/H and I never realised until someone pointed the differences out.
All four have different dials. One is half reading, ie you feed 10 thou to remove 20, one is direct reading, feed 10 to remove 10, one is half reading in metric and one is direct reading in metric.
None have the feed levers in the same place and none have the same pattern of feed lever, some have one lever some have two.
I swap between machines with no problem, as I said I hadn't even noticed the handwheel position until someone pointed it out.
In England the steering wheel is on the "right" side of the car in both senses of the word
In America it's right when its left
It would be OK driving an American car here if you had a distance between the other guy in front.
It's only the fact you can't see round that makes it hard.
I have driven in the States and found no problem.
I often take the channel tunnel thru to France and Germany with a right hand drive van without a lot of hassle.
It's something you get used to.
One of the hardest things I had to get used to was driving an ex-US Army Diamond T left hand drive breakdown truck here.
The biggest problem I found was getting called out to smashes in bad weather.
Visibility would be down to 15 and feet the the bonnet on the Diamond T was 20 feet [ or so it seemed ]
Managed to bounce off a few objects in that one at odd times