Lathe - $2800 (Chico, CA)

I don't know what they mean by lots of tooling. I see a QCTP in the pictures and that's about it. Might be worth taking a look if you lived nearby, but price seems a bit high unless it's really well tooled.
 
Just from the pictures, it looks like a 12" swing lathe, not a 24" swing lathe.
 
Anybody know anything about a Harrison?
 
12 in. swing British = 24 in. American
 
Janderso said:
Anybody know anything about a Harrison?
Click to expand...
I have a Harrison 13 x 40 lathe that was in very poor condition when I bought for about a scrap metal price. I've done a lot of work on it, but it's still not right. But that's not the lathe's fault. It was pretty abused when I got it and, if nothing else, I learned a lot about working on lathes because of that machine.

I also got a pretty good education on older Harrison's. Mine is a 1979 model.

The good:
They are VERY heavy duty, well built machines. Mine can take just about anything you throw at it. But again, the results are not ideal. I fixed about everything I know to fix, but it seems the likelihood is the ways are probably worn too much to be salvaged. That's life.

The bad:
Be prepared to spend a LOT of money if you need parts. The lathe in Mr. Whoopee's post also looks to be of older vintage, so I suspect cost for parts would be commensurate with my 13x40. There is not much of an after-market out there for these older machines, and if you need replacement parts, you'll need to either scour the internet for used; buy knew from Harrison (their US distributor is Clausing); or do without. In some instances, you may even need to make the part. (I needed a cross slide worm gear and nut. A guy in the UK was making the nuts, but I had to make the worm gear myself. It turned out great, but only because I was able to find a piece of compatible LH ACME threaded rod.) If you need any kind of drive gear or shaft assembly, it's not unlikely that the cost could be more than lathe. No joke. I needed one gear, but the only way I could buy it new was to purchase an entire shaft/gear assembly - $4,000! That's multiples more than I paid for the entire lathe. It took me some time, but I found a guy that had a complete headstock that I bought for $300. I used the gear I needed out of it and repurposed the headstock as part of an elevator style lift I made for pieces of equipment that are too heavy to lift by hand.

Bottom line on an older Harrison, I'd look at it long and hard before forking over any money. One bad 'something', and you could have far more invested than you ever intended. $2,800 sounds very high for that machine. Even reduced to $1,800, I'd be careful. As a frame of reference, I gave $900 for mine. I'm probably up to about $1,500, and I suspect I'll either sell it for what I can get for it, or dismantle it and repurpose whatever parts I can.

Regards,
Terry
 
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