Hello
I'm Anthony from South Yorkshire in the North of England and have been mechanicaly active since leaving school when I became a motor mechanic and served my apprentice.
I'm no longer in that trade but I have never stopped tinkerering. Many projects have been through my hands including a full panel rebuild of a Classic Mini, a Lotus Seven Inspired Replica kit car with a Honda Fireblade engine and a complete rebuild of a 2002 Suzuki GSX1400 from numerous boxes of bits to name just a few.
At the moment I have my 1979 Honda XL185S and a 1990 Honda CBR400RR in pieces slowly being restored along with many welding projects and inventions/modifications to existing components.
Metalworking has always been of interest to me and was a serious consideration when leaving school.
So now I have all the usual metalworking tools including 3 lathes.
The first I bought was an old Union engineers lathe that just had the cross slide and compound slide and the carriage was locked in position. This I am trying to modify to have a leadscrew on the carriage.
My next lathe is a Clarke CL300M which I wasn't very satisfied with until I discovered a bodge by the previous owner wher one of the carriage gib strips had broken and was mended with a piece of hacksaw blade. Two new gib strips later and all the other gibs adjusted I find it to be a really nice lathe but not big enough for the tasks I have in mind.
Which was why I was on the lookout for a larger lathe capable of heavier work and found a 1931 Colchester Bantam that is in very original condition apart from the motor and jackshaft assembly and came with a massive amount of tooling the value of which I'm sure exceeds the price I paid for the lathe.
I have it up and running after minor modifications and adjustments and it really is a nice lathe to work on.
At the moment only one of the seven chucks that came with it fits as the other chucks have backplates for a different lathe so I'm in the process of modifying the ones I have before attempting to make new ones from scratch for the larger chucks.
Anyway thanks for reading so far and I hope to make some contributions soon.
Anthony