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British restoration project

British restoration project

British restoration project

(OP)
As we seem to be posting restoration projects lately, here's one of mine which I'm having an on-off relationship with:

An old Holbrook toolroom lathe from the 1940s, it weighs in at 2¼ tonnes for a 13" x 30" machine which is unheard of today for a manual lathe. A little worn in places but I have quite a few spares from a donor machine. Some of the pics are from when it first moved into its new home - it's now off the rollers and running from a 15kW variable speed drive which someone sold on ebay as a 'power supply' for little more than the postage. smile











I don't spend as much time on it as I would like, but so far I've enjoyed having it.

RE: British restoration project

Scotty,
Great piece of machinery. You will enjoy many years to "consummate" that relationship you say you have with it.
Given its age I'm surprise to see what good condition it's in. It must have had a few lovers before you!
Those diagrams are the essence of completeness and clarity, too.

STF

RE: British restoration project

Ooooh oooh! It's so pretty!

My Daddy used to pay me a dollar to dig out all the metal shavings and clean his lathe about once a month. That was a mess of a job, I tell you.

Please remember: we're not all guys!

RE: British restoration project

(OP)
Greg,

Yes, it's a lovely machine to work on with a lot of features which must have cost a fortune to provide. I'd had it a few months before I found some of them. It makes the Harrisons and Colchesters seem agricultural. I nearly ended up with a CVA but the Holbrook was a third of the price and could take bigger work. If the opportunity arose I would love to have one of the Holbrook Model H machines from the late 1960s which are rare and expensive, and still very sought-after today.

Sparweb,

I think it has had a few owners in its seventy-odd years, some more careful than others. The saddle was full of rusty sludge from old coolant and swarf, and the little reciprocating pump which feeds the oil galleries in the head was knackered so the gears must have run nearly dry, but they're very hard and massively oversized so they seem to have survived reasonably well. The rack for the saddle handwheel pinion is worn and a replacement is going to be costly, but I have a complete spare saddle / cross-slide / topslide assembly, a leadscrew, and most of the gearing from the head. I've got the whole manual and although only a dozen pages it is full of practical information.

SLTA,

I'm happy to employ a swarf remover / lathe cleaner - $10 a time?? tongue
My dad had a lathe when I was a kid too. He was far more skilled than I am or ever will be, but he taught me the basics well and I can aspire to reach his standards. I wish he was here to show me, and I think he would have loved this old machine.

RE: British restoration project

Wow! Just Wow!
That machine looks like a dream come true. Just from the massiveness to the precision that's apparent from the pics.
It seems to be in the same league as Monarch, CVS and DS&G.
Congrats!
But I don't envy your potential troubles, should you need to relocate smile

RE: British restoration project

My father had an old Atlas lathe in his garage (the image below is pretty close to what it looked like) that he got from someone (I suspect it was to cover some old debt or something as he did that a lot). He used it occasionally to clean-up the end of a shaft he had repaired by build it up with weld/braze or to turn-down rod-stock for some odd-sized replacement drive-pin or something. When he died in 1989 I had no way of hauling it out here to SoCal, even if I had had a place to set it up, so I gave it to one of his old friends who's son said he could make good use of it. I suppose I should have tired to sell it, but my father always liked the kid (who had come and used it a couple of times) and besides, he agreed to haul it away himself and clean-up the mess in that part of the garage.



The only thing I hung on to was the 'Machinery's Handbook, 14th Edition' (copyright 1953) that had come with the lathe. I actually used it until I broke down some years later and picked-up a copy of the 25th edition (copyright 1996).

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

RE: British restoration project

(OP)
I've heard of Atlas but have never seen one in the flesh. The tailstock looks quite tall for the width of the bed. The Holbrook tailstock is wider than it is tall with a long barrel and weighs over 30kg.

Benta, the photo below shows the unusually wide bed for a machine of this capacity: inner ways for headstock, tailstock and fixed steady are about 9", outer ways for saddle are about 14".



RE: British restoration project

Ever heard of a 'Clausing Lathe'? They were once part of the Atlas Press Company. In fact, I had always called them 'Atlas-Clausing Lathes'. While Atlas is no more, I believe the Clausing company is still around.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

RE: British restoration project

(OP)
Hi John,

Yes, it's another name I've heard but have never seen. North American lathes are quite rare over here, other than the little South Bends perhaps, in contrast with milling machines where K&T, Cincinatti and Bridgeport are all commonplace.

For anyone interested in historical machine tools this is a great reference site: http://www.lathes.co.uk/page21.html . Both Atlas and Clausing are listed. The Clausing machines look very modern in style considering they were being built in the 1950s - quite square and boxy as most lathes are today.

RE: British restoration project

The Holbrook is in a completely different league compared to the Atlas.
The Atlas was a lightweight, hobbyist machine, it's market is served today by the cheap chinese lathes.

Benta.

RE: British restoration project

We had a 1940s Hendey lathe in our basement. It too was a heavy sucker, worn out before we got it. The drive gearbox was damaged, with a part seized in place that made it impractical to repair, so Dad jury-rigged a drive arrangement involving the transmission out of a 3 ton truck. We had five forward speeds, and reverse...driven by a 2 hp 240 V electric motor. The threading gearing worked, but the automatic feeding was used seldom for any other purpose.

That lathe did an enormous amount of very heavy labour in my dad's service. And you had to learn a few tricks to do anything precise with a worn machine...it taught me a lot of important lessons.

When he was about 93, he waited until my stepmother had left on an outing before disassembling, rigging and moving the machine's pieces out of the basement into the garage. He was an incredible backwoods millwright.

Enjoy your restoration job- you have very solid bones to work with there by the look of it!

RE: British restoration project

ScottyUK, do you have a weight estimate on your Holbrook?
My guess would be around 2 metric tons, but it could be heavier.

Benta.

RE: British restoration project

Beautiful. Who cares how much she weighs, does she still twirl?

RE: British restoration project

"Who cares how much she weighs, does she still twirl?"

Well, it matters to the floor you place it on smile

RE: British restoration project

(OP)
Hi benta,

About 2¼ tonnes, good guess. smile Put into context, that's roughly 1.5 times the weight a present-day Colchester Master and three times that of the Student, and the Holbrook has a smaller turning capacity than either of those machines.

RE: British restoration project

Scotty--that is a nice lathe. I have heard of Colchester, but not Holbrook. Looks somewhat similar to a Monarch, at least as far as heft. Atlas lathes, had flat ways, not "V" ways, for whatever that is worth.

RE: British restoration project

Please stop mentioning Atlas, it's a toy.
A comparable machine to this Holbrook would be a Hendey or a Monarch.

I'm still drooling over this one, although I wouldn't have room for it myself.

Only downside to this kind of lathe is, that the spindle speed is probably limited.

Love it, I hope you get it completely up to scratch, ScottyUK.

Benta.

RE: British restoration project

That brings back a few memories from 50+ years back, not that particular lathe but certainly similar makes. I can still smell the cutting compound (suds as we called it). Looks like an interesting project , plus you had better train a few young guys in its operation before the knowledge is lost to all the modern programmable units around today.

It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. (Sherlock Holmes - A Scandal in Bohemia.)

RE: British restoration project

I think the closest lathe available in the UK to the Atlas 6" or 7" ( AKA Sears Roebuck ) lathe would be the Myford ML 6 or ML7 lathe . Both should be considered schoolroom / hobbyist lathes , rather than a production lathe like Scotty has.
B.E.

You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.

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