drummond lathe help

[alansos]

    hello. i have just bought myself a drummond round bed lathe with lots of tooling etc,im a bit old at 77 to start a new hobby but if i master the lathe i might try a bit of turning etc...i have 25,0000 questions about the lathe  and if anyone can help with the first 3 i would be very grateful...1  where can i find the serial number to get the year [ it is not on the brass name plate] ,   is it possible to obtain a operators manual [i have found the on/off switch] but would like to go a bit further, cant think of the third one but ill work on it   thank you ...alan

[sbwhart]

Welcome to the collective  Alan

This link her may help answer a few of you're ?.  http://www.lathes.co.uk/page21.html

Hope it helps

Stew

[Pete.]

Hi Alan.

You won't find a year-of-manufacture on one of those but you can differentiate between early and late models by the way the headstock is made. Of the early ones the spindle ran in bronze mounts whereas later ones ran the spindle directly in the cast iron headstock. An explaination can be found here:

http://www.lathes.co.uk/drummond/page2.html

I had one of these for a while which I sold a few months ago, it had a 4-jaw chuck, faceplate and boring head, a fairly good selection of changewheels and an indexing attachment. They are cranky and awkward to use compared to anything even remotely modern but satisfying enough if you're in no hurry, and they have the benefit of being nicely solid and compact so work well in a tight space.

Pete.

[Raggle]

Try this Yahoo group if you haven't already

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/drummondlathe/

There's 5,000 messages on there it seems and maybe a useful "files" section

Ray