I bought myself a lathe
I grew up in a house with a workshop, where my father had a South Bend lathe1. We think it was a leftover from US war materials that stayed in the Netherlands for some reason. It was a 9-inch workshop lathe, just like this one:
He bought it in the late 1970s; it was probably already more than 40 years old by then.
When I was training as an engineer, I used to work on the lathe sometimes. It was old, and the bearings overheated if you pushed it too hard, which would lock up the spindle. Still, I learned a lot by using that old machine.
Years later, I realised that I had not only learned a lot, but also enjoyed lathe work. So I decided to see whether I would still like it, and I bought myself a lathe. Of course, it should not be too expensive, since I was not sure I would really enjoy it. The question was: which one?
Having relocated to the central part of the Netherlands, my workshop was — well, just the small shed in the garden. So a big lathe like the South Bend would not fit. The Myford line of lathes was noticeably smaller, and I thought it would fit. So I bought a used Myford ML7, not really knowing what I was getting myself into. Here it is:
The serial number of the lathe is K37764.
It seems it was bought from a toolshop Schmeink in Rotterdam:
I did some research on Schmeink, but could not find an ongoing business in Rotterdam, although a company with the same name is located in Schiedam. I cannot determine if this is still an active toolshop anymore. In the ’Naamlijst voor den Telefoondienst’ from 1915 a A J.W.A. Schmeink can be found as a tradesman in machines:
The previous owner said he inherited it from his father, who had not used it for more than 10 years. Well, somewhere in its long life (according to this page, it was built in 1957, so it is even older than me!), it must have been used extensively, as the bed is worn by about 0.1 mm over its total length.
I made a table so I could work with the lathe, which you can see in the photo as well.
Little did I know how much work I would do with it, but also on it2.
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More on South Bend lathes and tools (and on the Myford brand) can be found on the Lathes.co.uk site. ↩
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I started a blog on Blogger in 2013 to document the work I did. This blog is a recreation of that blog in 2026 on my local hosted website. ↩