We had a Southbend/Nordic 25 lathe in the shop at the powerplant. It had a compound on it which did swivel. I forget how the compund was unlocked to swivel, possibly with two hex nuts. I think the angle the compound was swung to was read thru a kind of plastic lense. As is noted, the thread/feed chart took some doing to understand.
We kept the compound off that lathe to use for in-place machining work on the turbines. Junked the rest of the lathe. I will check the compound when I get back to the plant in a couple of weeks and see what the locking mechanism is like for swivelling the compound.
Overall the Southbend/Nordic was strange. The tailstock had this plantery gearing in the handwheel which was kind of light and tended to fall apart. Towards the end of the time we had that lathe, we got rid of the planetary gearing and made a solid handwheel hub. The worst thing on that lathe was the "power clutch lever" on the apron. It was dangerous. The apron had a "power clutch lever" which had three functions- to control direction as well as stop/brake. You had a set of pushbuttons up on the headstock to start/stop the spindle motor, but direction of the spindle and actual starting/stopping of the spindle was controlled using electromagnetic clutches within the headstock via a lever on the apron. If you put the lever fully down, the lathe ran in the normal direction. Pulling up on the lever to center position stopped the spindle and brought in a magnetic brake. Up past center postion and the lathe spindle reversed. Problem was there was no real solid detent in that lever's mechanism. People tended to bring the lever up past center and the lathe spindle went from full ahead to full speed astern many times. This played hell with the magnetic clutche sin the headstock. It played hell with the internals in the headstock to some extent.
Eventually, the clutches failed due to breakdown of the insulation on the coils and the slam-bang loading from the sudden reversals of the spindle. The clutches are electromagnetic clutches which are right inside the headstock, in the oil-soaked environment.
Those clutches proved to be the undoing of the SOuthbend/Nordic lathe in our shop. We could not get replacements, trying thru LeBlond and trying to contact Muller et Pessant in France (the OEM, who has divested themselves of that lathe line and sold it to a Belgian firm).We contacted the firm in Belgium & the French OEM for the clutches.... got nowhere. We were not thrilled with that lathe, though it was not in bad shape otherwise. That lousy power clutch lever arrangement on the apron had taken its toll in the headstock. It did not pay us to mess around reworking the headstock to convert it to a solid drive (eliminating the clutches) and using VFD. We could not give that lathe away in the shape it was in. It went out to our "surplus yard" and ultimately went for junk as far as I know.
We replaced it with a beautiful big Leblond heavy duty 25" x 96" lathe, and have been running heavier jobs and doing all sorts of work that would have pushed the envelope on the Nordic. No one was upset to see that Nordic lathe go out to the boneyard.
FWIW: LeBlond, Ltd had tried to help us with the cltuch problems. They discovered the headstock cross sectional drawings they had for what was supposedly our Nordic 25 lathe differed wildly from what we, in fact, had. Later on, LeBlond, Ltd contacted us to see if we could give them some information about our SOuthbend/Nordic and to see if we had solved the clutch problems as they had another customer with similar problems. Seems they were kind of stumped for information and part son those Nordic lathes. We told them we had solved the problems by putting a LeBlond where the Nordic had been.
Joe Michaels
Joe Michaels
