I have found a lathe locally and wanted opinions on it. This will be my first lathe. I talked to owners son and will look at it tomorrow. Link is below.
http://athensga.craigslist.org/tls/5698569348.html
11" Rockwell lathe
Re: 11" Rockwell lathe
Appears to be fairly clean but what do you want to do with it? To chamber rifle barrels through the headstock you need at least a 36" bed with a 1-1/2" spindle bore. Also a short headstock spindle helps when chambering short barrels. Unless you get a lot of tooling with the machine count on spending equal to the machine cost on tooling.
- McLarenross
- Silent But Deadly
- Posts: 551
- Joined: Mon Aug 06, 2007 1:22 pm
- Location: Eagle River Alaska
Re: 11" Rockwell lathe
I have a 70's vintage model of that lathe (that one is from the 60s) and it works great for gunsmithing. The spindle bore is 1.375" so it will fit all but the biggest barrels. Cant tell for certain from that pic but it looks like it has a L00 spindle mount so running the lathe backward will not loosen the chuck but the L00 backplates are a little more expensive and rare. Only thing I didnt see in the pics was a steady rest, which is really just a nice to have thing. If you need to do metric threads I would look elsewhere though, cause metric change gear sets are impossible to find. For $850 Id jump on it either way though.
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