Southbend Lathe

[chris vickery]

While slowing gathering equipment to outfit my shop, I have been on the lookout for a decent and reasonably price metal lathe.
This is a tall order, especially with small bench top lathes.
I happened across an ad recently on Kijiji and found an old Southbend 9C for cheap.
Not exactly the one, being a manually gear changed model vs a quick change gear box for thread cutting.
I made a deal on it and picked it up Friday night. In the dark.
It is a diamond in the rough, having been badly stored in a damp garage.
Lucky for me, the lathe itself was not too bad, having been liberally smeared in grease (and so was I after picking it up)
Unfortunately, the tooling and change gears are pretty rusty but I will use one or more methods previously described here in the Forum to beat the rusties.
Access to a bead blast cabinet and roto polisher at work should help too.
The most interesting part about this one is the history I discovered yesterday while giving it a quick cleanup.
I ran the serial number on the Southbend data base and it appears to be a wartime model, 1940. On the rear of the bed I located a data plate which was greased over. After cleaning it up it read- Department of Munitions and Supply Ottawa Shared Property of the Canadian and British Government. There is also a serial and control number.
I also found a second data tag on the front of the bed. A small oval tag which read- AECL NRX. I recognized the prefix right off due to working in the Power Utilities business but had to Google it to confirm and decipher the rest. Atomic Energy Canada Limited Nuclear Research Experimental.
This was the site of the first nuclear reactor built in Canada at Chalk River which opened in 1947. I can only assume this little lathe was used somewhere in wartime service, only to be put to use post war in another government facility when it was surplus. Imagine the stories it could tell...
Pics to follow.