Thread: Tube v cast iron beds

None at all. The Record are a good lathe but they use a No.! morse taper which makes it a little hard for some accessories.

In one word "accuracy". Odd jobs needent be accurate, however the time to set up a tubular bed for repeatable accuracy with the manufacturing tolerances they have is next to impossible.

The next is speed, pulley changes manually, behind a switched door, not up there in issues but uggh.

The next is size, if your odd jobs are small, sweet, if they need to larger than a small bowl diametre wise....

The next is attachments, sure you can work with jam chucking or faceplate, but its so much nicer to be able to fit up a chuck (4 jaw / jacobs / live centre / dead centre / mini centre / etc.)

The next is solid shaft, no morse tapers to fit chucks to in either end, and no choise in talstock as its a sealed to thread fitting.

The next is the tailstock and bed flex, if your jobs are long, so will be the time it takes you to allign it all over and over while your turning, often also because the thread is an acme type in the tailstock with a locking nut if often unlocks mid turn, and another thing to check constantly while turning.

Because of the above you end up spending valuable time before during and after turning, fixing checking and rehashing. Theyre prone to vibrations and harmonics whitch make them loosen up.

etc etc.

If by pipe beds you meant the square formed beds on those generic "roval / royal / gmc" type of thing.

Hope this is a help, they have their place in market, and they certainly work. i was given one and perservered, because of my personal attachment to it (was my pops), i still have it and it serves me well as a converted faceplate disc sander. And while i do in fact dabble in pens now, among other things, i quickly reached my limiting factor on the pipe bed lathe at every turn, it cost me time and confidence.

Neal.

Yep, what said. I'm on my third Record lathe, they just got bigger each time. The solid bar ones are better IMO, lot more weight.

My first lathe was an old Record with tube bed. If set up as per the instructions it was spot on for accuracy. The spurs lined up perfectly. I never found vibration to be a problem either and I turned blanks as big as the thing would take. I was able to find No1 morse taper live centers at Carbatec and an adapter so I ran a Nova chuck on it. I had it about a year and it did have limitations so I traded up to a larger machine. If I could have got one of the larger Records with a swivel head at the time I would have gone for it as it was a well made,quiet, smooth running machine. I found I still have a couple of pics of it.
Regards
John

Ahh those ones. They look to be a bit better made than what i'd thought he was talking about, the circular tube bed ones i know nothing about.

Neal.