Britannia Lathes.

I would like to know if anyone on this forum has experience of using lathes manufactured by the Britannia Company in Colchester around the turn of the last century. Were they well made? Would they still perform well today in the context of accuracy? Did their operation differ in any way to other conventional machines? Any comments regarding them would be greatly received.

My brother has our grandfathers Britannia treddle lathe and I used it for a while and it did what I wanted it to do, our grandfather built his steam engines on it with no trouble and never had an electric motor on it until he died and his grandsons fitted one.

Martin P

Thank you, I'll infer from that it was a pretty good machine and capable of working to some degree of accuracy. What size is it, out of interest

5-10 years ago there were tons of them on ebay, presumably as older guys gave up or passed on

It seemed like no two were ever alike and most were of a simple basic layout

Loads of them had that u-bend type gap bed and were solid looking lumps of cast iron

Tonys place has a page and there's a book

Colonialism, the Empire and WW1 probably had a big influence on the firms outputs which lasted until the 1930s

They never caught the imagination for some reason, unlike many other brands

Edited By Ady1 on 30/04/2015 15:16:49

Yes his page is quite interesting but is unfortaunely incomplete due, we assume, to the limits of his source material. I am considering buying a book very similar to that. There does seem to be a lot of variation in design but the finish quality on many looks very good. It isnt very obvious if they have hollow spindles although their steadies are of a rather nice if basic design

Ralph,

The bed of ours is 3' 6" to 4' long, the chuck stands at about waist height.

Martiin P

Ralph,

The bed of ours is 3' 6" to 4' long, the chuck stands at about waist height.

Martiin P

Thank you Martin, that makes your words even more useful to me

Thank you both for the replies

Graces can have useful info on old companies

Good quality PDFs of "The Engineer" can be downloaded which are full of old pictures of gadgets from a bygone age, plus they are all pdf searchable

Edited By Ady1 on 01/05/2015 09:40:09

Be cautious in relying upon Graces, a Halifax company Willson Lathes, formed in the late 1800s is shown as being established in the 1940's!!

There is some interesting stuff on there, particularly some of the older adverts but yes, many records are incomplete and if they cna be that far out then everything must be taken with a pinch of salt.