Lathe users,

What have you turned down jobs, had to improvise other solutions, or just plain wished your lathes had in terms of capacity?

Until recently, I've had to turn down jobs because of swing and or gap length.  We now have a LeBlond 32" Heavy Duty sliding gap lathe which will solve nearly any of those issues.  I have had laments that our 20" Monarch could not take a bit longer electric motor shaft while our 32" Microcut lathe was in use. In addition, the hole through the spindle on the 50's vintage Monarchs has been a small lament.  Mostly, however the slow speeds of these older machines prevent efficient use of insert carbide tooling.  

Again, what do you wish your lathe(s) had in terms of capacity.

Mine is a 10X24.  I have wanted more length more times than I've wanted more swing.  I have turned things longer (cutting down truck axle flanges for disc brakes) than the bed a few times using the steady and having it hang over the end.

If I was trying to make outside money with it, and had the space and power to feed it, I'd prefer something in the 16X48 range.

Sometimes wish the spindle bore on my HLV was bigger for threading barrels then I use other lathes and realize how much better the HLV is and just don't think about it anymore.

Length and spindle bore are 2 big ones...

I have a 15" LeBlonde Dual Drive 78" between centers and 1.75" spindle bore. I wouldn't go any smaller.

My dad has a pair of Lodge & Shipley Powerturn 13" (more like an 16" if measured how most mfrs measure) that are both 54" between centers and 2" spindle bore. Definitely wouldn't go any shorter than 54" between centers...

But those are all serious machines. The Leblond is around 4,000 lbs. The Powerturns are 7800 lbs each and have 15 hp motors on them...those take a big power supply just to turn them.

12x36
Swing and length never an issue
36mm spindle bore - now THAT is something I've banged up against many times.

More spindle bore.

I can do whole barreled actions in the shop at work without pulling the barrel and even thicc suppressors because I can just slide stuff into the giant spindle.  My Lathe at home only has like a 7/8" spindle bore and it's annoying not to be able to do stuff at home.

1440 with a 4" bore.  More bore before distance between centers.  Any bigger than that I'll need a bigger shop first because I'll want a smaller lathe too.

I have a Bridgeport and my old bench top mini-mill.  The mini-mill still gets used more than the Bridgeport because most gun related work is smaller stuff and easier on a smaller machine.   Not that it can't be done on a bigger machine.  But lMO, the if the smaller machine is capable of the task, its easier than doing the same thing on a bigger machine.  

In true ARFcom fashion, get both!

Truth.  With a big bore, you can always just slide long stuff in through the bore that won't fit between centers.  But if you don't have the bore to handle something then you'd *need* the distance between centers.

If you're sticking long parts through the bore often, a spindle spider on the back side is super helpful - especially for dialing in true on bore lands (using gage pins) for threading rifle barrels

True swing is typically 2.5" larger on diamter than catalog swing in machines of this vintage.

I wish my Monarch had a larger thru-hole.
I wish my Pacemaker had helical gears, as well as opposite feeds on X and Z.
I wish my Mazak had live tooling.
I just wish I had a Mint 10ee.

Not mint, but worth a look.

By the 50s many manufacturers had started switching to listing maximum swing. My Leblond Dual Drive, for example, made in '54, the predecessor to their highly regarded tool room lathes, was listed as a 15". It will barely swing 15" over the wings, 15.5" over the ways with the saddle pulled back, and IIRC 11ish" over the cross slide. And it's not just Leblond. Either way, I only pointed it out because 13" sounds much like a modern "12x40" import type lathe, but the Powerturn 13" more closely compares to a 17" heavy duty lathe, it has a 15 hp motor, something most people cannot even fathom.

By the 50s many manufacturers had started switching to listing maximum swing. My Leblond Dual Drive, for example, made in '54, the predecessor to their highly regarded tool room lathes, was listed as a 15". It will barely swing 15" over the wings, 15.5" over the ways with the saddle pulled back, and IIRC 9ish" over the cross slide. And it's not just Leblond. Either way, I only pointed it out because 13" sounds much like a modern "12x40" import type lathe, but the Powerturn 13" more closely compares to a 17" heavy duty lathe, it has a 15 hp motor, something most people cannot even fathom. The tailstock alone, on the powerturn, is larger than the headstock on a 12x40 import. It's about 24" long, has a gear crank that runs it down the bed (bc you can't slide it), and is 2-speed, low gear for drilling, high gear for rapidly retracting a drillbit to clear chips and re-engage.





To a certain extent I agree, bigger bore is important, it sucks having a really small bore. But the reality is once you get over about 2" the older, quality machines with a bore that size get rare and hard to find so your choices are newer import stuff, or newer high quality stuff which gets very expensive.

The reality is that with proper fixtures, distance between centers beats spindle bore because you can almost always put something between centers or fixtures, you can't always fit it inside the spindle. Say I have something 10" diameter and 60" long that needs work. Spindle bore does you no good (unless your bore is 10+") if your distance between centers is less than 60". But with a longer distance between centers and a little fixturing (live chuck on the tailstock like CEE, fixture plate, and steadyrest) you can handle it. This is why older machines didn't prioritize spindle bore; older machinists knew how to fixture stuff and run between centers/fixtures. It seems we've lost craftsmanship in some regards.

I had a Powerturn for a bit.

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I just sold a 10EE, it wasn't mint by any stretch but it had good bones. I thought about keeping it and restoring it with upgraded drives but decided against another project.

That's a nice one! Spindle bore AND length on that one!

I would hate to know the weight, IIRC, the 13" Powerturn is around 400 lbs for every additional foot of bed. My dad's 6k forklift needed weight on the back to pick his without tipping forward, and the guy that loaded them used 2 forklifts, one on each side to lift while they backed the trailer under.

It was a great unit, just too big.  But, I picked it up for a song.  2013/17, raised in the sand to swing 26x126, IIRC.

I think weight was around 10k.  That's about the limit of my ability to move comfortably and the comfort was....thinning.

Edit-
This says 8600lbs base.  If you add 400#/ft, you're at 11,800.  
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