Replacement lathes. Recommendations?

Denford is also a UK based supplier of (CNC) machines to education.

Nigel is quite right, I did forget quite a few details. I am no expert on old lathes, but if the serial numbers on the beds are to be believed I have an AUD, two CUDs and one DUD to replace.

The lathes are typically introduced to the students in year ten - so fourteen year olds - with very simple turning, facing and parting operations for the most part. Manual threading is also done on the lathes, so they're basically used as big jigs for ensuring concentricity. Once into the sixth form the intention would be to up the level of lathe use to include single point thread cutting, offset turning and knurling, but at the moment we can't really do that with the lack of control we have on these old machines. Some of the students get involved in aerospace projects too, but there is too much 'give' in these machines to guarentee high levels of precision.

Tristan,

I would suggest that you employ the services of a time served 'machine tool fitter', to recondition your existing machines. Would you suggest that your service engineer fits the bill?. By this I mean does he have the required skill or can he recommend an appropriate person/company who you can visit personally to verify and perform due diligence to ascertain that they posses required skills. i.e. visit their workshop to check how they recondition old Boxfords.

If you can manage the above, you maintain consistency in the way you train your students, and the students who are already using the Boxford can continue to carry on doing things as they have been trained.

ARC is a distributor of SIEG machines, but for education enquires we direct to AXMINSTER due to various reasons mentioned below:

A. Axminster are used to education requirements. If you decide to consider the SIEG SC4 lathe from them, consider buying the Lathework for Beginners link from ARC. In USA, there are a growing number of schools and collages installing the SC4 machines in their workshop - supplied by Little Machine Shop, who in turn purchase this book from us for supply to the schools/students. The technics in the book are universal, but the book has been written for a model brushless motor machine, and the machine used for this purpose is an SC4.

B. ARC, along with many schools and collages have (in my opinion) limited understanding of Health & Safety requirements... for example placement of E-Stop button / e-stop switches, central E-Stop mushrooms, correct guarding for machines. We have only supplied lathes to one school in Harrogate, and that was only after assessing all the risks with evidence of appropriate safety issues being addressed. The installation of all the lathes was successful. However, we refused to supply milling machines to the school in question, based on my own risk assessment for the machines they were intending to buy.

C. Most of the hobby machines we sell are ideal for the 'single user' environment. When there are more than one user using the same machine, there can be a basket of good, bad and ugly operators, resulting in correct use/abuse of machines. Here the level of after sales service combined with regular maintenance required goes up exponentially. This is usually reflected in the high price an education order would entail, combined with the school having a good maintenance program in place. This is outside the scope of ARCs business model.

Regardless of who you buy from, school/collage orders always carry a high price tag. Cost is not in the machine - it is always in the after sales maintenance program.

ARC is happy to supply products other than machines to schools and collages.

Ketan at ARC.

Edited By Ketan Swali on 03/05/2023 15:29:12

TechSoft in North Wales are an educational supplier of CNC machines. **LINK**

Would also recommend XYZ.

I can reel off a fairly long list of Uni's and FE colleges I've visited who have their products, and the technicians who run those workshops generally feel very positively about them.

Optimum also seems to be popular with FE Colleges for full size lathes.

Variable Speed might be the rub, as all the Unis and Colleges I've visited were running gearhead machines with 12-18 discreet speeds and a similar number of feeds, presumably to equip students for what they might expect to encounter in industry if they were asked to operate a manual lathe.

Oh sorry, I thought the op would want something that actually works and doesn't need new electronics every week. 🙄

Or you could get a Warco that has had no electrical problems for 13 years or Sieg with none for 15. like wot I got

Opps forgot one LED failed on the Sieg which I got from the supplier no problem just have not bothered to fit it so it has been in a draw for 8 years.

Edited By JasonB on 03/05/2023 18:17:14

Looking at the cost of the machines mentioned here, I suspect that I will have to stick with my trusty old Chinese crap model !!

Anyone else in the same club ??

,In the days of old, very few could afford to pay £500 for any machine, how many could now afford £15000/£17000 ?, not too many I would think. Schools might be different.

I have often looked at some of these new machines in showrooms, but that,s all I did, just looked ! Looking at the prices, you,de need to bring a chair with you .

Machine tools have always been very expensive so I doubt they are any more expensive in real terms than they ever were.

How do you currently handle such things as setting the spindle speed on the Boxfords, Tristan ?

I would have thought that letting 14 year olds loose on the workings of the machines (belt / back gear changes) would be frowned upon in educational circles (though I could be wrong ! ). Boxford underdrive machines are great here, as the rotating bits are in the base behind a lockable door, allowing the teacher / technician to pre-set the speed so that the pupil just has the start / stop buttons to control. The hobby size variable speed machines would possibly be problematic here - speed near instantly changeable from minimum to maximum with a 270 dgree twist of an easily accesible potentiometer on the headstock.

Screwcutting is another area where the hobby machines are generally more akin the the Boxford CUD (changewheels to set for each pitch), with few having a gearbox like the AUD. The industrial trainer lathes which have screwcutting gearboxes are larger, more powerful machines than the Boxford - not sure I would like to put an inexperienced 14 year old on one of those for their first turning experience.

Having had a look around at what is currently available (for my benefit as much as yours - I am mulling over a change ATM) one machine rather stands out - Warco's geared head GH600 lathe, currently on offer for £2860. This includes a stand, 3 & 4 jaw chucks, faceplate, machine light, fixed & travelling steadies, covered leadscrew, start/stop operation via a handle on the saddle + more. 12 speed geared headstock and screwcutting gearbox that cuts a wide range of metric & Imperial theads with just one changewheel change to go between the two , it is a bit larger than the Boxford but not as large as the industrial trainer machines & has similar capabilities to an AUD.

You could probably get 4 for your budget to replace all the Boxfords and have change.

Nigel B.

When the Myford ML7 came out in 1946 it cost about 40 Quid. According to an online calculator, that is equivalent to about 2,100 Quid today. About what a similar sized Sieg SC4 hobby lathe costs today.

I haven't been here all that long, mgnbuk, but it appears that historically the lathe speeds are left as they are in order to avoid grovelling around underneath messing with belts and stuff (I'm the technician, by the way, the teachers don't have a lot of mechanical experience and before I turned up they had been without a technician for a long time). They certainly don't interfere with back gears or anything like that. Our AUD is not used because we're waiting for the disconnect to get fixed, so I don't know how the gearbox is set up (I am aware that we have a box of assorted change gears, but we have so many different lathes of different vintages I have no idea what they're for and I've never had time to do an in depth investigation - we have some larger Harrisons in another workshop, they might be for those) and the lathes are badly installed so it's very hard to get at the gears anyway, the headstock ends are almost right up against a wall.

You're right about the potential concerns with a variable speed, I watch the students on the lathes like a hawk, but I can't be everywhere at once so a gearhead lathe would probably be better in the long run. I have looked at Warco lathes, we have an old one in the other workshop that the school had had for years but never bothered to have wired up, so I got it working when I arrived and although I know our service guys were rather scathing about it, it seems to do everything it's supposed to. Sadly I don't have any change gears for that either, I need to try to get finance to shell out for a new set.

I suppose it is all down to risk asessment, let them wind up the wick or let them change gear while the machine is running in which case the variable speed may cause less damage.

In my opinion Tristan, it would be the biggest mistake you will likely ever make to get rid of the Boxford lathes. If some are irreparably broken that is a different story. Anything you buy now, except top end very expensive industrial lathes will not be designed and made as well as the lathes you have. They and the South Bend lathes they were based on were designed specifically for use by people learning lathe ops, or using lathes infrequently, but at the time they could hold their own in toolrooms as well.

I'd suggest finding a technician that could do some reconditioning and refurbishment on the ones you have. Ultimately this may cost far less than new machines would.

You know it really niggles me when people talk of Chinese products bring 'crap'. Of course they aren't, our households would not function without Chinese products which do exactly what they say on the tin. How old is your service engineer? I would bet he is getting on in years and eaten away with resentment that the British machine tool industry now barely exists, and what is left merely assembles Chinese parts and hopes that by condemning the products damage will be done to the importers who he will subconsciously believe have brought about this situation. I don't have a Warco or Axminster machine but if I were to be starting again it would be an absolute no brainer as to what I would purchase, not only because there would be no British machine available within my price range but because even if there was Myford is a very dated design and leaves a great deal to be desired and is not suitable for educational purposes, IMO. BTW, I have a Myford 7R and if it were possible I would take it with me with the rest of my grave goods just like the other old warriors, but I would never buy another.

+1 for that. My Warco's been run regularly for 8 years now with no electrical issues.

Ketan's cautions are well worth bearing in mind too. Supposedly solid British machines, even those allegedly designed for an educational environment, aren't immune from a careless speed change. A local heritage railway's Colchester Student recently lost all 13 teeth off one end-pinion of a central headstock gear through such an incident. In searching 2nd hand replacement sources, it became very clear that practically every other gear in the headstock could be had in good condition from a breaker's, but the particular gear in question was only available new-manufactured at a price close to the market value of the whole lathe. Obviously this crash has been happening often, for long enough for someone to spot a market niche.

I suppose it is all down to risk asessment, let them wind up the wick or let them change gear while the machine is running in which case the variable speed may cause less damage.

Relatively easy to frustrate a careless / malicious speed change on the Warco GH600 gearhead machine - set the required speed then remove the handle from the speed change dial. It may be still possible to rotate the dial without the lever in place but, given it is detented, I suspect it would take two hands to do so.

Not so easy on a variable speed machine. The inverter equipped machines (WM Warco 280V IIRC) may work if the speed were preset & a cover fixed over the potentiomer, as the inverter should ramp the spindle up & down from standstill. But the "brushless motor" setups seem to require the pot to be used to stop the spindle before pressing the off button & start from the zero pot setting when starting (these drives don't seem have acceleration ramps & require the ramping to be done from the pot ? ) - so access to the pot required at all times ? Obviously damage to headstock gears isn't an issue here, but the pot is easily accessible to be easily "tweaked" by, say, another pupil while the machine was in use.

I would guess that bed wear would be a issue with a well used '60s Boxford. The Boxford bed top formation (all vees and flats + vertical edges) were gang milled in one operation originally. In the early '80s Boxford did re-machine worn beds but those days are long gone (along with the machines that used to do the job) , so I would guess that machining out bed wear would be a costly excercise now.

Nigel B.

Can't speak for the brushless lathes but my brushless mill stops and starts at whatever the pot is set at. The two brushed machines that I have - mill and Warco lathe I also start where ever the pot is positioned

That really is a mad post.

You recommend a Chinese lathe despite not having one, basing your opinion on the fact that our homes are filled with other completely unrelated Chinese stuff and disregard a service engineers opinion based on assumptions he may be old and bitter? 🤨

I read his post as expressing the economic realities of the situation, there are very few "western" manufacturers of manual machine tools left, and even the Taiwanese offerings like XYZ (which seem to be held as being of a more consistent and perhaps higher quality) are dwindling.

If money and availability were no object it would be easy to suggest a new Schaublin (Switzerland) or Trens (Slovenia)... But both are significant factors in any purchase.

.

Regards criticism of Far Eastern manufacturers, remember it's not all that long ago that the Eastern European options like Stanko, TOS and Poreba were treated with great suspicion for being cheap imports...

But are now viewed as being very desirable, quality machines, offering unique capabilities at a fair price (something which has kept those businesses going long after a lot of the British manufacturers folded), and it's accepted that the historically cheap pricing was really a reflection of the premium placed on acquiring foreign currency via export sales by those economies at the time.