As usual, on Wednesday I spent some time in the craigslist tools section. Searching for a lathe, I came across this beauty only an hour away from the shop.
I immediately emailed the seller and A.Y. who has a pickup truck. We made arrangements to meet Thursday evening and I started doing research about the model of the lathe. It's an Atlas model Th42 and, like the mill we recently purchased, it was probably produced in the 1940's. These things are built of solid cast iron and tend to last forever though.
After work yesterday, I hopped on the train and went to the shop to grab A.Y.'s pickup. After much swearing in traffic, I picked up A.Y. on the lower east side and we made our way to Long Island to grab the lathe.
The lathe was sold by the third generation owner of the Road Runners bicycle shop in Glen Cove. Apparently, the shop used to be a motorcycle shop, and somewhere in it's history they moved to bicycles. In the back room, where the lathe was housed, there was a full sized South Bend mill, a sandblaster, and many other heavy machine tools. There were also a couple of classic British motorcycles mid restoration. It was truly a great shop. It also turns out that the seller and I had met a couple of years prior at the North American Handmade Bike Show in Richmond where I was showing the Bamboo bikes.
We did the deal, loaded up the truck and made our way back.
The table wasn't original to the lathe and was a little flimsy, so we decided to use it for something else and mount the lathe on our cabinet alongside the mill.
It was getting a bit late by the time we got to the shop, so we didn't mount the motor to the table yet, but that should be a fairly simple job.
All in all the shop is really coming together.
-W.W. SBSS
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