Faircut Lathe Owner

I have had this lathe a considerable period of time, and as I approach retirement i thought it would be a good time to try to fix it up. However, I am not sure how the motor and drive were originally connected to the lathe drive. There are no fixing lugs on the main body of the lathe to attach a motor drive frame. Any ideas?

Hi Charles,

I assume you have checked out Lathes.Co? There has been a few threads also on this forum and on other forums that may be of help:

***Link***

***Link***

***Link***

Thor

Welcome Charles from a fellow Faircut owner.

You have a Faircut 'Senior' lathe there (i.e. not a Junior - the 'Senior' name was never used by Faircut AFAIK). It looks pretty complete if a tad mucky. It's fairly early, having the flat belt pulleys and lacking the extended trip bar for disengaging the dog clutch. Your compound slide may be non original, perhaps to find more clearance for that toolpost - the original toolpost has no 'shelf' and there is only about 12mm between the top of the compound and cantre height.

Your countershaft is mounted on some generic lineshaft brackets so may have been attached to the wall of the previous owner's workshop.

You need to get hold of some flat belting - mine is old school leather but other types are available. Tony at lathes.co.uk does all sorts of belting.

Figuring out a suitable drive configuration depends very much on what space you have and how you want to arrange things - you can either mount the countershaft at a similar level to the lathe mandrel (make sure that the belt clears the backgear shaft on all three settings). This arrangement can be a squeeze height-wise if you want to have everything mounted on top of a bench. Another possibility is to mount the countershaft high up so that the belts drop down from above. Tony's site should give you plenty of ideas - look at other pre-war lathes too (Myford, Zyto, Dummond etc) for ideas.

Arranging some guarding for the belts would be a good move especially if you mount the countershaft high up.

You also need to figure out a way to tension the belts - most folks these days rig up the countershaft on some sort of hinged supporting frame welded from angle iron, either with a turnbuckle style tensioner or perhaps partly relying on the weight of the motor. Some old school arrangements may have used a jockey pulley for tensioning.

Regards, Andy

Hi Charles

Welcome from another Faircut Lathe Owner I think this means there are 4 Owners n Model Engineer

I have a Junior which i have had for over 40 years

Regards Brian