email: tony@lathes.co.uk
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Adept Lathe - United States

Adept Home Page   Adept Shapers  Specialist Adept Pages   

Australian T.N.C. Adept   Larger T.N.C.-CamSon Bench Lathe

    Mr. F.W.Portass

If any reader has copies of T.N.C. literature
the writer would be pleased to hear from you

Adept literature is available   

Details of the American company are obscure - but having adopted the English name one must assume that they were set up to either import the lathes and accessories or build them locally under licence (with the possibility that, to aid manufacture, copies of the casting patterns were shipped out). The American model, identical to the Super Adept, was offered with a wider range of accessories than the UK model including collets, a milling slide, 4-jaw independent chuck, faceplate, drive dogs, a hand T-rest, an extended headstock spindle to take a 6-inch diameter speed-reducing pulley, tailstock chuck, cutting and milling tools, a 2-step replica of the headstock pulley, angle plate, Morse centres and a headstock thread mounted on a taper for use in the tailstock. Missing from the collection (but available the UK version, was a countershaft unit. In addition a simple drill press was available - this being shown mounted on a board together with the lathe as a "complete workshop" with each sharing the same neat countershaft drive system. The American seller certainly went to considerably more trouble than the English maker to make the lathe appear an attractive proposition to the home-workshop enthusiast, the 12-page sales catalogue containing an illustrated list of accessories, photographs of typical job set-ups and a suggestion for how the Adept-based workstation might be constructed. Adept USA also listed the same hand-operated shaper as sold in the UK.


Some pictures are high resolution and may take time to load



An illustration from the "art-worked" American catalogue that showed the lathe at "full size"

Although the American Adept Tool Company did not offer the bench, shafts, bearing supports, pulleys or grinding attachment, they did list a special extended headstock spindle that could carry a 6-inch diameter pulley to obtain speeds low enough for the turning of large diameters.
If you have an a Adept and a similar miniature drill assembly (they are relatively common) it would be rather fun to make a replica of the above. The frame was 28" long, 16" deep and made from 1" x 1" x 3/16" angle iron welded tog her and topped by a 1-inch thick wooden top. A small motor running at between 1400 and 2000 r.p.m. and fitted with a 4-step pulley was mounted underneath the stand--all the drive belts being round leather.


Accessories for the USA Adept included collets, a milling slide, 4-jaw independent chuck, faceplate, drive dogs, a hand T-rest, an extended headstock spindle to take a 6-inch diameter speed-reducing pulley, tailstock chuck, cutting and milling tools, a 2-step replica of the headstock pulley, angle plate, wrench, Morse centres and a headstock thread mounted on a taper for use in the tailstock. Missing from the collection (but available the UK version) was a countershaft unit.



Adept Home Page   Adept Shapers 

Specialist Adept Pages   

Australian T.N.C. Adept   

Larger T.N.C.-CamSon Bench Lathe

    Mr. F.W.Portass

Adept Lathe - United States
email: tony@lathes.co.uk
Home   Machine Tool Archive   Machine-tools Sale & Wanted
Machine Tool Manuals   Catalogues   Belts   Books  Accessories