On Fri, 05 Jan 2007 21:17:23 -0500, John wrote:

Other than at Williamsburg and Sturbridge, are there any genuine 18th
century lathes in existence elsewhere in North America, preferably ones
that have detailed online photos available for viewing, that one can
look at. I kind of like the idea of peregrinating about the eastern half
of this continent but I just don't have the time to visit more than one
or two distant museums this coming year so I'd like to narrow my search
to the most promising ones. My search is specific to the 18th Century.
My Google and other Internet scrounging has unearthed a bunch of modern
day adaptations but the museum folk I'm working with are very much
concerned about creating as authentic a reproduction as humanly
possible, and for that we need some genuine real articles to emulate.
These historians love their documentation at least as much as their
museum pieces, I'm afraid. ;-) We're not particularly interested in the
"great wheel" lathes but more humble town and village types that were
presumably as common as dirt at one time but which seem not to have
survived in the larger, well known museums.

A thing to bear in mind is that most of what is now the US was only thinly
populated by Europeans in the 18th century. Historical societies in the
thirteen original colonies and the Spanish and French occupied areas
(Florida, Louisiana, California, etc) would likely be your best bets.
Might spend quite a lot of time making calls before you find lathes.

I suspect that the wooden spring-pole lathes were mostly shop-built and
idiosynchratic--if you can make it with hand tools and it works and looks
something like the illustrations in the various histories then it's
probably as "authentic" as anything you're going to find in a museum--but
I don't have a source for that. Might be worth looking at it from an
"experimental archaeology" viewpoint--make one that looks like a picture
in a book, using hand tools only, and see what goes wrong, fix it, and
after the fourth or fifth one you should have a pretty good understanding
of what compromises are forced on you by the materials and tools.

Thanks,

J.

--
--John
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(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)