Viceroy Short-bed Lathe

This Viceroy short bed lathe is a wonderful lathe. I can turn up to 16″ over the bed and if I wanted and needed I could also turn larger pieces on the outside. However since I have another, larger lathe I’ve never set this up for outboard turning.

This lathe has been converted to variable speed running from zero to about 1400 rpm. This is great as the belts for the different speeds are harder to change on this lathe than my little Scheppach. So I have an inverter mounted on the wall and a three phase motor. There was a three phase originally on the lathe but unfortunately not the right one for the job. Strange to my simple, unelectrical mind that three phase was needed when it runs off single phase!

The lathe was in the ceramics department of a college and they decided they didn’t need it and were just getting rid of it. A friend of mine who worked in the department wondered if the lathe would be of any use to me and carefully protected it against the weather and offered it to me which I was delighted about. I, with the help of my friend who had rescued it, had to get it into the back of the van I was using the day I visited. Needless to say it was very difficult but I was determined to succeed, especially as I had a suitable vehicle and was far from home making picking it up another day extremely difficult.

There was no tail stock with the lathe. Huw contacted Viceroy and an elderly gentleman sent the plans for the tail stock for Huw to use to make one. I contacted Viceroy a few months later to send him a bowl turned on the lathe but was told he’d retired and no-one seemed to have an address for him. I was very sorry I hadn’t managed to thank him properly for his kindness. Just goes to show how important it is to reply promptly especially to thank someone! The wheel on the back Huw rescued from an ancient combination machine, the only part of which I bought was the planer-thicknesser which will plane 24″.