grayson lathe

Hello ! I've just bought an old bench-top lathe at a farm auction. It looks like a Grayson but there's no name and from Google pictures it's not quite right. Anyone any ideas ? Also it has a triple, flat-belt drive pulley but I'm having difficulty finding one similar so I can replace the missing motor.... I've tried a lot of searches and I don't have a big enough machine to turn a new one

Could you upload a picture or two (or many) please? Someone on here is bound to recognise it.

Hello and welcome to the forum.

Quite a lot of similar lathes were made by small firms copying each other. Also not every variation of each mfrs range is included on the LATHES site depending on what info he has available.

You can run with a v belt from the motor onto the flat pulleys to start with. Use a plastic heat welded type to get it through the headstock. You may find metal flat belt layshafts and motor pulleys a bit hard to find but can make them out of plywood. Once you have the lathe basicly working you can make metal bushes for the wooden pulleys.

Thank you both ! I'd not thought of a composite plywood drive pulley... sounds a better idea than bodging a V belt so I'll give that a try first.

I tried uploading a snap but the file was too big so it's on flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/132824106@N07/

Thanks again for a lovely welcome to the forum and your help - Robin

That is absolutely indistinguishable from my Portass Model S (or XL or Zyto, etc), apart from the colour and the lack of a maker's name on the front web. And your topslide has a fancy handle but I wonder if that was original.

Looks to be in decent knick! I managed to make mine do all sorts of stuff when I was a boy, in true model engineering fashion.

Murray

Robin, many years ago I used to convert this type of pulley on these machines to V belt, you do of course need access to another lathe. If you would like a drawing and details of "how to" please PM me and I'll see what I can find.

Regards John

P S where are you situated ?

Robin - My very first 3 1/2" lathe (long gone) was a belt driven Grayson and that name appeared embossed on the front of the bed casting. So if your lathe does not say Grayson on the front then its probably not one.

Mine was driven by a flat leather belt running from a wooden disk mounted on a motor driven lay shaft to the three speed drum on the lathe. I can still hear it running now - slappety slap

Rik - sob!

As I said, I managed all sorts of jobs on this machine in "model engineer" fashion. I converted my flat belt pulley to vee-belt. using a cast pushchair wheel as a temporary pulley whilst machining the flat belt pulley on a mandrel between centres.

With a little thought and ingenuity, you can carry out a lot of work with just a lathe. I also made a 2-speed, clutched counter shaft for it, which served its purpose well for many years. Later, I made a sensitive drilling machine using just the lathe and a Wolf hand drill which also gave years of service. Subsequently I made a rack and pinion feed head for it using a Morris Minor steering rack and a set of bearings from a Suffolk Colt lawnmover.

Murray

Ahh, memories memories in the true sense of make do and bodge----I recall very similar cannibilisation of muck spreader and hay bailer parts to build a power take off driven timber winch for my grey Fergie tractor, using a three shaft manual drive beach winch for boats as the basis..

It was great fun to use as well.

Brian

Edited By Brian Wood on 03/05/2015 11:02:06

Edited By Brian Wood on 03/05/2015 11:02:27