"Mike Henry" wrote in message
...

"Harold and Susan Vordos" wrote in message
...

"distracted" wrote in message
om...
I am looking for a good used 36"ish lathe & small mill suitable for a
basement shop & preferably with some tooling & at a reasonable price.
Does anyone know where I might look in Toronto, Ontario or within a
few hours drive?

Chuckle!

36" lathe for your basement? Better be a walk-in. :-)

It might be a good idea to specify a swing while you're asking, assuming
you
aren't really looking for a 36" machine. Typically, when a lathe is
discussed, swing is the designation that is mentioned, with the distance
between centers coming next. A 36" machine would be a monster,
needing
its own foundation, far more than a basement floor could support
properly.

Good luck--

Moving a 36" lathe is actually quite doable Harold, depending on the
lathe.
An Atlas/Craftsman 12"x36" can be moved by one person if the lathe is
strapped to a refrigerator dolly. A friend & I have moved a Clausing
12x36
and a Rockwell 11x24 to our respective basements, but each of those
required
a fair amount of disassembly. Each of the latter two weighs around 1,000
lbs.

A Monarch lathe would be beyond by skill and tool set, but I seem to recal
pictures on the web somewhere of someone who managed it with the help of
professional riggers. They brought it in through an outside concrete
stairwell with a crane, AIR.

I've come to the conclusion that 1/2 ton is about as much as I can handle
in
a basement move and that drops a few tens of pounds as each year passes.

I agree, but you're talking about smaller machines, not 36" machines. I
think you missed my dry humor. As I said, lathes, at least in the
environment in which I was trained, are not specified by bed length, but by
swing. Bed length is important to, but doesn't define a machine in the
same sense as does the swing capacity, which I'm sure you understand. As
the post stands, to the casual observer, you'd be talking about a large
lathe. Needless to say, you and I understand he's not talking about such a
critter. I thought it was a great opportunity to pass on to a novice, in
a light hearted manner, a way of asking in such a way that he/she would be
better understood by the masses.

Look at it this way. If you had an interest in a 12" machine with a
center distance of something in the area of 36", but found a lathe that had
the asked for 36" centers but was a 24" machine, would you still have an
interest? Yet, if you found a 12" machine that had longer or shorter than
36" centers, it might still be acceptable. Bed length doesn't change a
machine's features the way swing does.

Center distance can be quite important, but most lathes have the vast
majority of wear within a narrow band, near the chuck. In essence, bed
length is rarely used once you're beyond about 24".

Harold