I think most people say beware of buying an old lathe as it could be worn not that it will be worn and clapped out. Or don’t buy if you can’t tell the difference between a good one and one that has just been repainted and gone over with Scotchbright.

If it has been sitting unused in a school for 40 of those 45 years or was completely reconditioned and reground by the previous owner it is quite likely to be in good condition rather than one that may have been in a jobbing shop working 8hrs a day 24/7

Again I would say it depends on the lathe, hopefully a good lathe would still be within the original allowed spec by the maker.

But given an equal amount of use I would expect say a 2nd hand Hardinge to give better figures than a 2nd hand Boxford particularly as they were originally made to a better spec which I would likely be paying a lot more for.

Do you know what the original factors specs were?

Also given the recent Emco thread a good spindle is not the whole story – bed and tailstock wear could give problems even if the spindle was spot on possibly due to replacement bearings at some stage in it’s life which are easier to replace than doing a regrind.

As far as I know no-one on this this forum has ever said, “don’t buy an old lathe”.   They have said “Condition is everything”, because it’s the machines’ history that matters, not who made it, the number of features, or how old it is.  Old lathes have had longer to be knocked about than new ones, and they don’t come with a warranty.   Ideally test them before buying, not after!

This certificate might help. Though for Boxford’s somewhat cheaper ME10, I’d expect an AUD to be similar.

Dave

If your Boxford has a screw threaded spindle, 1 1/2″ x 8 it doesn’t matter at all how worn it is. Backplates will refit and retain their accuracy as long as the rear register sits fully against the face of the spindle. We have many chucks, faceplates and collet plates for both lathes which have radial clearances from 0.0005″ to 0.020″ and they all repeat perfectly. When a chuck needs dismantling for routine cleaning, the backplate gets fitted on its own to check that the front face still runs true and I have never needed to re skim one. A new bought or shop made backplate should be fitted and refitted several times before skimming true the front face, with the minimum cut depth to fully cover the whole surface.

The only thing that tends to annoy me slightly is that our two lathes at the museum have different spindle threads, but might be a good thing because they might not interchange perfectly between two machines.

The Smart & Brown model A is over 76 years old and very worn indeed, but if you know it well, it can give very good results. I would trust the Atlas 12 x 24 to give better facing over a large diameter than the S & B, and also better for diameters over 8″ long, but it is hardly worn at all in the bed.

Your set up and methods are how I would have done it, and I sure don’t know of any mistakes you could have made to create numbers like that. My Bison ER and even Schaublin ESX collets were I thought pretty decent, but none of them can do what yours seem capable of for basically zero run out on that pin. That might be even more impressive. 😁 Which manufacturer made your collets and collet chuck if you don’t mind me asking?

Thanks Hollowpoint, now I know what brand to buy if I ever need a new and different sized collet set than I already have. And even made to be adjustable, very well done getting your chuck and it’s nut to repeat to that level of accuracy. 👍

Good result there.

Here’s my 1942 South bend I rebuilt.

On 21 February 2026 at 10:11 Pete Said:

Also very impressive Pete, did you have your spindles MT reground?

No, I just set the bearing clearance according to the manual and gave it a good clean and polished the journals lightly and that was only to remove staining. In fairness, any plain journal lathe in good condition should really have very good runout test scores.

It does go to show that you really cannot judge a book by its cover. The lathe was very sorry-looking indeed when I bought it (as a test subject for renovation), but the heart of it was good.

Well as I said Hollowpoint, I’m making a lot of assumptions about how Rego Fix really did it. The exact same angles, almost the same dimensions other than about 1 mm reduced size difference in overall length that was changed, and so far no other similar collets I know of that Rego Fix might have borrowed or used ideas from. That seems to make the E collets the most likely where they started. If someone had good rotary grinding equipment and I suppose EDM would make it easier to add the extra 6 slots since there so hard, I’d say one of those E 25’s could be modified enough to just be an ER. Even the collet size series are the same for those two different sets of 25’s I have. However I’ve never really looked into it, all I know for sure is that Schaublin did make at least the E 25 size. I don’t know if they also made anything like E 20’s, E 32’s, E 40’s etc. Some of the other ER series from the ER 8’s up to the ER 50’s might be 100% Rego Fix’s own design and invention efforts?

Even 12um for my visualization purposes is only .000472″. Still pretty decent for anything I can think of that’s 70 yrs old.

I had to Google those 472e collets. Definitely not something I knew about before. Since they do have that same extraction groove. Made after Rego Fix did all the work, or did Rego Fix steal there design? That seems unlikely given that Rego Fix is thought to have invented the ER’s. With a quick search, even Google says they invented them in 1974. “The design was created to improve on existing collet systems by adding a groove, allowing for a self releasing mechanism and a wider clamping range. The name ER comes from “E” (the previous standard) and “R” for Rego Fix”.

The Vertex website does show 472e collets and was one of the first hits I got. From that website they lists them as ER 40 (472e) So just something interchangeable with ER’s, or maybe an Asian used designation instead?

I’m not sure there even being sold or available anymore, of if they were ever sold in the UK. Maybe 25 years ago and from a few of the off shore tooling dealers here in North America there were some really cheap sets of appearing to be ER’s but not quite collets and chucks being sold. The set I looked at sure seemed to be poorly made. One of those tool dealers told me that at least one of the Chinese manufacturer’s had developed and were trying to put on the market there own design for something very similar to ER’s. But looking at them, the nose angle and it’s length wasn’t quite the same, and even visually, the body taper length was quite noticeably longer than ER’s. I remember reading some North American forum posts around that time about a few trying to get additional sizes or replacements of these collets to fit there collet chucks and it seems they were failing to find any from anywhere. Something that was tried and quickly failed possibly? But I’d bet some of those not quite ER old collets and chucks still show up on places like Ebay once in a while.