Home Motor Digital readout

Fixing up an old lathe

I have an old lathe which I want to get into good working condition to use for clockmaking and other projects.

The lathe was bought for £50 a number of years ago from someone near Bingley who had bought it for her husband. Her husband was really after a woodworking lathe so it was never used and just sat in a garage.

This is a treadle lathe which was made by C. Lindley and Co Ltd according to the name plate.

At some point an electric motor was fitted to the lathe but this is no longer in place although most of the parts are still with the lathe but not attached. Check the motor page for details of fitting the electric motor.

The tailstock has an MT1 morse taper and is fitted with a drill chuck. I have bought an MT1 dead centre from ebay.

The mandrel is hollow and is fitted with a 3 jaw chuck on a 11/4" square screwthread and has an MT3 taper.

There is a backgear which is attached to the headstock by 3/8" BSW hexaganol setscrews. Two of the set screws are missing which previously attached the motor to the lathe, so I am ordering some more from CCS fasteners as they have a good range of whitworth fasteners at reasonable prices. I have been making measurements of the lathe so that I can get the correct parts, details of the whitworth screwthreads from oldengine.org helped interpret the measurements of screwthreads and wikipedia helped with the morse tapers as I could not find my engineering tables. I need to get another set of engineering tables and will put in an order for the Zeus tables when I place an order for other parts.

The lathe has a leadscrew of 8TPI. The cross and topslide each have a screwthread of 8TPI but no graduated index dial, I intend to provide a digital readout using digital calipers. I thought this was a stroke of genius on my part but as soon as I looked for details of the calipers on the web I discovered that lots of people are already doing this. See my digital readout page for details of of what I have found out and what I am doing.

Home Motor Digital readout