Harrison L6

Hi, I hope this is posted in the correct section.

I have the task of clearing the house of a hospitalised relative and there is a Harrison L6 12” swing lathe that needs a new home. I know nothing about it and my Uncle has other things to worry about and is a little confused. There is no three phase available to try the lathe. Could anyone give me some idea of a fair value as I really have no idea. I realise this is difficult without seeing the lathe but I believe, worse case, it would have scrap value so don’t want to give it away. The Lathe is in the Farnborough area.

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeremy

A quick search produced an advert from Lathes.co.uk at £1650 but note that this is almost certainly a private sale so there is no VAT element to consider and also the ad may not be current.

**LINK**

L 6 are rare as your ad on Ebay shows, you are it. None are coming up sold either.

You've got 2 bidders, none of which are traders so they might fight it out.

L6 are just too big and heavy for transport and most shed workshops.

The lathes.co seller is a dealer, he has 3 large lathes under his name.

Thanks for the advice. I couldn’t find a current ad for comparison hence the post but it certainly is a bit of a lump.

Fair value on the open market is difficult for machines like this, a lot comes down condition, accessories and to how much effort the buyer will need to put into moving it.

However the Harrison L series lathes are pretty desirable because they're in the class of machines which are proper industrial tools, but small (or more specifically light) enough for a hobbyist to be able to have at home without serious upheaval; I wouldn't expect you to have too much trouble selling it.

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I would expect it to fetch between £800 - £2500 to a private seller depending on condition and accessories, assuming that it's easily available to load onto transport (good access for a Trailer or Small Hiab Vehicle), being in a position to assist with loading (if a neighbour or family friend has lifting equipment they can loan or come along with) will help getting the maximum value possible.

Make an effort to catalogue all the things that go with the lathe, photograph them, and capture that in the advertisement, cleaning everything (say 30-40 minutes to sweep up and swarf, wipe dust or oily gunk off etc) and tidy the area around the lathe before photographing it, will also increase your ability to get a good price.

I would suggest that listing it as a "buy it now" item on eBay and slowly reducing the price if it doesn't sell within a month or so is a good option to recover maximum value if you have the time. If it continues to not sell or you need to speed things up, you can then move to an auction easily.

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All that said, you might end up dropping as low as £400-£500 if access is awkward, and the deal is that the buyer has to remove it from the workshop and move it a substantial distance to a location where they can load it.

If you know you're in that position, it may be easier to accept that you won't realise the full market value to begin with and sell to a dealer who is well prepared to deal with this aspect, rather than have several iterations of "Failed" sales where you go to a lot of effort and aggravation only for the whole thing to fall through.

You need to make the call as to whether you want to realise the maximum value for your uncle, or just have a painless removal process.

In any case if access is awkward, you will do yourself a massive favour by documenting where the lathe is, and the route it needs to move along to where it can be loaded, and either sharing this with interested parties, or if selling by auction, putting it in the listing clearly.

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Regards weighing it in, Ferrous Scrap prices are currently showing £180-£200 for "Grade 9-10 Cast" and £155-£185 for "Grade 5 Light Iron", with the L6 weighing around 780kg you'd realise between £128 - £156 if you weighed the lathe in, and a scrap merchant who had to collect it and move it further than they can immediately reach with a hiab truck, may only offer to take it away for free to reflect their costs.

You would almost certainly make a better return selling to a machinery dealer than to a scrappy (who if they have any sense is going to have a dealer they run things like this by when the receive them in).

Thank you so much Jelly for taking the time to do that, it’s really helpful.

I have a Harrison L6, it came complete with inverter, faceplate, catch plate, 2 x 4 jaw and 2 x 3 jaw chucks, fixed and travelling steadies, burnerd multi fix collet chuck and full set of collets, Dixon tool post, with about 6 holders, loads of tooling plus the Harrison boring table and the conversion gear for metric threads. I gave £1800 for it in 2020. It’s never been in industry only model engineer owned so in perfect condition. If that helps?

Paul.

It's definitely a garage or concrete-floored dedicated workshop sized machine tool, I wouldn't fancy my chances trying to move it over even a well designed suspended floor.

That said, I can't agree the L6 is too big or heavy to transport, I can be pretty confident saying that because it's a little smaller than and half the weight of my TOS S32 which I moved myself.

It's just a matter of being suitably prepared for the undertaking, so one would reasonable expect a significant amount of disruption on the day of collection, with the buyer being on site for several hours, along with bringing assistance and significant amounts of equipment, unless they have paid a professional transport service to collect it with a HIAB vehicle which being a full sized commercial vehicle poses its own space related challenges.

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For Jeremy's benefit:

If someone is comes to move this lathe themselves you should reasonably expect them to be bringing:

• A Transit sized van or a large car/4x4/pickup and trailer.
• A lifting gantry or engine crane.
• Lifting slings or chains and shackles
• Machine Skates or many stout metal rollers (lengths of scaffold pole are a common choice).
• A pry bar and a jack.
• lots of wooden blocks to assist with stabilising/supporting whilst they're lifting.

They will need to use the jack to get the rollers or skates under the lathe (possibly using the pry bar to get the jack under there first), then manouvre it to the loading area using pushing, pulling and prying, even relatively small obstacles (minor bumps, rough patches on concrete) will add time to this, and traversing a small curb could easily add 45mins to an hour. If they're going up or down even a small slope they will need to anchor to something stout in order to lower or raise the load under control using a strap, rope or winch.

They will then need enough space to get their lifting equipment around the lathe, whilst still being able to reverse the vehicle or trailer they have brought into position once they do lift it. This space needs to be flat ground, and ideally some kind of hard even surface.

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If the buyer has arranged a transport firm:

The firm they will most likely bring a lorry mounted crane (possibly a demountable forklift in some cases), you should factor on this being on the large size for a non-articulated lorry with a turning circle of up to 41 feet (12.5m to be precise).

If the area it's coming from is tight for space and you want to minimise disruption ask the buyer to have the transport company ring you in advance so that you can plan the parking arrangement and any space which needs to be cleared in advance, and ensure that they know exactly where it's coming from and to bring additional manpower or equipment if neccessary.

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Some specialist transport firms who are set up for doing this kind of thing specifically do use tilting trailers with winches or transit-sized 5 or 7 tonne vans with small cranes mounted on them instead of larger vehicles, but they're not nearly as common as the more industrial type of operator.

If everything I've described previously was a bit off-putting I can give you the details of at least one possibly two such firms, so you can get a quote for transport controlled by you, then offer the lathe for sale delivered (which should attract a price premium above and beyond the cost of transport really).

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Hopefully all this is useful information to know, and will help make a potentially quite stressful experience which itself is part of a bigger more stressful life-event for your family that little bit less challenging.

Being fore-warned is fore-armed and all that!

When I picked up the L6 I went with a crew of four with all of the above, plus two sheets of 8 x 4 x 3/4” ply split into two lengthwise to make a roadway across the grass plus a haltrac type hoist to hold it back as the grass was down hill! It was quite a difficult move as it had to be turned 90 degrees, pulled out through a standard door, turned again, moved across the grass and over a drain into a narrow passage between the houses, out into the road, lifted on the engine crane and the trailer backed underneath. I was very fortunate in having an experienced machine mover on the crew! All went very smoothly really but it took us about 3hrs in total to get it on the trailer.

Did a similar exercise collecting my omnimill but we winched that onto the trailer and was most fortunate we had a forklift the other end to lift it off! I will need to move both machines again in the future! With care and good planning everything is possible.

Paul.

Jeremy is the lathe still for sale?