Another 618

Thanks. Confirm that yours has aluminum gear and belt guards.
 
It has aluminum belt, gear guards and cross-slide cover. It also has the smaller half-nuts if that helps any.
 
OK. A very rough estimate of year of manufacture is 1953 +0-5. I have no idea what the 12I stamped on the bed is about.
 
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Sorry for the delay, not much free time during the week.

The 618 I have with the aluminum guards has a sn# 013452. The 618 I recently acquired with cast iron guards has a sn# 007646.

I received a tremendous amount of extra machinist related items along with the 618 I just received, still need to sort thru all that. I also received a folder with Atlas literature with this lathe which I still need to look through as well, I will post what I find in there to see if its of any interest.
 
Got a chance to look thru the papers, I thought there was more but unrelated. There is an "Instructions and Parts" manual dated July 1976. Parts list "No. ATL80-1" dated August 1980. Also an "Atlas 6 & 150MM Lathe and Band Saw Catalog" CAT. EXD-3. That looks like the newer MK2 version. If any of that is of any interest let me know.
 
OK. I'll ask you the same question that I asked Rooster. Can you confirm that the belt and gear guards and the cross slide cover are actually aluminum and not Zamak? One rather time consuming way to do it would be to remove and weigh the two guards. Then use the water overflow method of Archimedes to determine the actual volume and weigh it and calculate the density. Then compare that number to the published densities of cast aluminum versus Zamak V.

The highest serial number 618 yet reported is 027421. Judging from catalogs and some assumptions as to the catalog dates, the 618 was in production from mid-1937 until mid-1972, or 35 years. Assuming that the total number produced was 30,000 and a constant production rate, that dates your two to 1953 and 1946. As production during WW-II may have been higher than before or since, as initial production was probably lower, and as production in the 1970's and latter 1960's must have been declining, or they wouldn't have been discontinued, and as just a wild guess, say probably +0 -5 years on those figures.

The 1976 illustrated parts list is the last known one. We have a scan of it but the quality is poor as whomever did it used a rather low resolution and to further degrade it, used True Color instead of the correct monochrome. The best one that we have is the earliest illustrated one, from 1950. Comparing those two and the 1962 one, there were a few changes made over the years, but the main ones were with exactly what parts are used with the back gears. Most of the rest didn't change. The earlier manuals for all of the Atlas built machines tend not to give details on threaded fasteners and keys. A lot of that has been added to the 1950 edition in Downloads.

I don't believe that we have a copy of the ATL80-1. I have to check EXD-1.
 
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