EMCOMAT 17S lathe

Hi, yesterday I found on this site that "OH CHUFF!" has owned one of these lathes since 2013. I became the owner of a 17S at the end of 2014 and recently having sourced a rotary converter for it and a prexisting Lathe in the workshop finally got the cable supply to workshop uprated in the late Summer. I am hoping that Oh Chuff will be in contact and any others out there that have one of this series of Lathes 14, 17 and 20 S and D. I would be interested to hear their experience of using this machine. As yet having little time I have only been able to check it works and start to adjust the jibs and feedscrews to get it something like I feel it should be. It came well tooled and subsequently I have got a copy of the EMCO manual for the lathe that has allowed most of the problems to be ironed out. Specalist Machine Tools near Peterborough have be very good giving me photocopies of some pages of the Service Manual. THis has been a great help in finding out how it is assembled. Next time I will post a photo, if I can and say a bit about why I got it. All the best!

Hi, well I found that Mr Oh Chuff's Emcomat 17 and mine were brothers in a Welsh Technical College years ago. The interesting technical point that has become clear that my two days spent getting the very crooked tailstock co-axial with the lathe centre line were not wasted and having achieved alignment without the parts manual were pure fluke. Can you believe it but Emco offer two tailstocks for this type of lathe? One is a conventional set over tailstock with the front and rear set bolts and a clamping bolt for the set over on the face of the tailstock casting. The other looks identical It has the set screws front and rear, no clamp bolt on the face and on the back face of the tailstock two other setscrews. This tailstock cannot be set over, alas in the past somebody thought it could be and had never reset the misaligned barrel. I found by chance, having given up on what I thought were the adjustment set screws that it was the rear face pair of screws the caused the barrel to swing on the sliding part of the tailstock. It took a lot of time to get it right with the test bar. Why would a lathe not have a set over tailstock as standard? Is it to force the owner to buy a taper turning accessory? I would post the two parts diagrams for the tailstocks but I fear it would be a copyright breach. Are there other lathes with alternative tailstocks one that can be set over the other being adjustable (by mistake) in a totally useless way?