Origin of Asian Lathe Design

louosten

louosten

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Gentlemen,

The basic Asian lathe design is quite remarkable from an engineering standpoint. Although belt driven, it has some desirable features such as hardened V-ways, helical gearing in the headstock,, ball bearings, robust castings, metric & english screwcutting, power longitudinal & cross feeds, decent swing (11-12") and length (24-36"), and generally very versatile from a small shop standpoint. That it was originally built overseas and offered to the US at a competitive price is also somewhat amazing.

Not withstanding the idea that Taiwanese engineers could have developed the design independently, my hunch is that the basic design originated somewhere else and eventually found its way to these talented builders. One example of this is the Emco Maximat Super 11 lathe, originally designed and built in Austria. It is my hunch that Emco at some point in the recent past decided pass production on to Taiwan/China, where it was re-incarnated as the new South Bend 'Heavy Ten', currently offered by Grizzly.

Your thoughts and commentary are welcome, and best regards!

Lou O.
(1982j Enco Branded 11"x24 Taiwan Built 'Precision Bench Lathe'
 
Perhaps some of our European members can give some insight. It would be interesting to learn the history.
 
Aaron,
We were just talking about these......
Lou, it seems the late 70's and 80's was the time frame where most manufacturer's drank from the Kool-Aid and moved their operations off shore.
We were moving from the carter years to the Reagan years.
This must have been a bad time for the labor unions and the blue collar workers who lost their jobs wholesale. (not political) =historical economics.
 
Yes, most likely manufacturers moved production there and the designs were duplicated. The sad thing is very few refinements have been made since....
 
Janderso said:
Lou, it seems the late 70's and 80's was the time frame where most manufacturer's drank from the Kool-Aid and moved their operations off shore.
Click to expand...
Especially the clothing and textiles manufactures. Really hurt a lot of small towns that were supported by those plants.
 
I don't see any heavy 10's on offer from Grizzly.
 
Every business responds to competitive, wage, and supply pressure.

Can policy help or harm? Sure....

But underlying economic conditions will certainly be most important.


For the OP....

I have a Samson lathe that appears to be one of these.


The South Bend 9" was widely copied and "improved" on by so many manufacturers that it might be argued that they were the genesis of the Asian lathes.


Notably Boxford

Boxford Lathes

Power-feed apron as used on Boxford Model A, Model B and VSL lathes
www.lathes.co.uk

in England.

Probably the thing which made this possible more than any was WWII which engaged factories all over the world in making precision machine tools to support the war effort. Once the war was over I'm sure enterprising entrepreneurs all over the world found opportunities and seeking competitive labor, and supply options this is what surely drove the factories in Taiwan and China towards what we have now.

John
 
I don't know about the larger machines but this was definitely the case with the common 9x20 lathe. It is clearly based on the Emco Compact 8. There is some discussion of this at Lathes UK.
Emco did shift production to Taiwan with the Compact 8E (E for export), I don't know if the copies started before or after the shift in production. The design would eventually evolve adding a 1/2 Norton gear box which was not a feature of the Compact 8.

Many of the small Asian knee mills clearly show some similarity to the small Clausing and Rockwell mills.


On a similar topic you may be interested in the book When the machine stopped. It is focused on a single company Houdele Industries which gobbled up many smaller US machine builders including Logan, Burke and Powermatic. The chapters devoted to their failure in the 80s as they started to face serious competition from Asia, first Japan and later Taiwan and China are particularly applicable.
 
I was involved in the transition in the baseball business.
Haiti was a major baseball manufacturing point.
When I was plant manager of Incrediball, Westar in 1983 in Port-Au-Prince, Spaulding, Rawlings, Debeer, Wilson were all there.
Taiwan was receiving the business due to the political unrest.
Incrediball was bought by Easton Sporting Goods.
That was a long time ago!
 
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