Calling all Colchester Bantam owners.

Greetings lathe nerds, i need your brains !

just purchased a colchester bantam, it's not even here yet !

anything i should know about them ?

any foibles ? nuances ? annoyances ? peculiarities ?

anything i really should be buying for it ?

I'm SO excited.... can you tell ??

Very nice and enjoyable machine but you will be buying tooling and things ..but wait until you see what comes with it.

Several different models and many types of works fitted accessories, you may want to join the Colchester iO Group, manuals and many other users there will also offer advice and help.

The geared head has it's own oil level sight gauge which may or may not be easy to see through, the lower gearbox also needs the oil checking or changing, it's a very low capacity, the greatest amount is in the head.

Make sure the bed is cleaned before traversing the carriage or you could trap abrasive dust between the saddle and bed.

Emgee

Link to iO Group https://colchesterlathe.groups.io/g/main

Edited By Emgee on 24/04/2021 22:05:07

Fourth post in this thread:

https://www.model-engineer.co.uk/forums/postings.asp?th=133708

I see that like me motorcycles are your interest, you have no doubt heard about the exploits of Alan Ruddyard ? and his very special bikes. I believe he uses a Bantam.

I think you mean Alan Millyard and yes in the last TV series we saw he has a Bantam (lathe, not bike)

One of these was in an auction not a million miles from me yesterday. Co-incidence? I meant to log on and see what it made but I forgot.

Rik

A fellow Bantam owner here. I've just fitted mine with a VFD after the old phase converter died. I've always been pleased with the lathe; both the Bantam and and I are even happier now the motor has a decent 3-phase feed.

Yes Alan Millyard is the name I was trying to remember, brain is not what it was since the stroke last year.

I have a metric Bantam 2000. The only advice I can offer is to take a degree in Crypton Factor to allow you to figure out the screw-cutting gearbox. It just about makes sense when you get there but I suggest you add your own notes in the manual because it covers all variants of the gearbox which are very easily confused until you become really familiar with it.

PS. I can send you a scanned copy of the relevant pages of the manual with my annotations if you contact me through the messaging facility on this forum.

Edited By Chris Crew on 26/04/2021 07:55:45