My brother and I spent the afternoon of May the Fourth picking up some new toys. This one is mine:
Getting it into my basement was a bit of a pain, both literally and figuratively. We broke it down into parts on the trailer, including taking the legs off, and slid the main beam down the stairs on a pair of ramps, with a come-along controlling the slide. Once in the basement, we turned the beam on its side, put the legs back on, and tipped it up to where it's sitting. It needs some cleaning before I put it back together the rest of the way, but I can lift the rest of the parts by myself. It looks very similar to a 1930s South Bend, but it doesn't have back gears, which all the materials I've found so far say were standard on South Bends. I'm not sure how much is missing and how much it never had, like a gearbox for power feed or threading or any sort of drive system. It did come with a small AC motor and a modified transfer case that someone started putting together but never finished, but I don't think I'm going to use them. I'm probably going to try to find a newer/bigger motor and a VFD to drive the head, and some sort of variable speed motor to drive the power feed. I'll then feed both of them into a computer to handle DRO, constant surface speed, threading, etc. Basically drag a 100 year old machine into the modern age kicking and screaming
It's a bit of a back burner project, though, I've got a bunch of other much higher priority projects, mostly in the garage.
My brother's lathe is bigger and a heck of a lot heavier, and it's the one we were actually getting on the 4th. IIRC it was made by something Crawford. His has power feed, threading, all that good stuff. The guy selling them had a bobcat, we had to use that to load it onto the trailer, and then remove the carriage and a few other heavy bits before unloading it with his tractor. I think we were probably over the 1800lb weight rating of the trailer and tires, and I took it very easy on the way home. He has a bay door right into his basement, no steps to go down, but he does have a slope inside the garage it will need to go up, when he's ready to put it in place. His also has a non-original powertrain "featuring" a transfer case from a Willys Jeep, but at least it's complete and functional.
