Plough Book Sales

If you have a copy of Yates: Model Making (also available from us), you'll have a good idea of what this is about.

A bit more than half the book is about the basics of lathe work as it was practiced in 1922. But then you get some info that is rarely seen elsewhere: how to build a small metal lathe, a small wood lathe, and a model gun.

Chapters include: choosing a lathe, setting up and driving the lathe, the lathe and its parts, lathe attachments and their use, measuring tools and their use, a lesson in metal turning, advanced lathe work, screw cutting, wood turning, metal spinning, building an amateur's metal turning lathe, building a simple wood turning lathe, and how to build a model rapid-fire naval gun.

It's a fun book to read - loaded with illustrations of lathes, tools and attachments. You probably know how the lathe is used, so the how-to is really too basic for us. There are better instructional manuals available, but this book is still fun.

Note that the text is far too short, but the drawings are interesting. 6-3/4" throw over dual tubular bed, ball thrust bearings with Babbitt bearings. Castings are needed. You can turn those out in aluminium, or cast iron if you have a cupola, or perhaps you could have someone cast the patterns in iron for you.

The wood lathe is a simple but interesting machine capable of rotating 6-1/2 cylinders over the bed.

And the gun plans are based on a more-or-less standard 6" naval gun used by the Americans and the French. The model has an 8-1/4" length barrel and fires a 0.25 calibre centre fire bullet. Rapid fire here means a quick loading breech gun, not a machine gun.

Code No. 010592