Manufactured by Boffelli & Finazzi S.R.L., San Francisco (CBA), Industria Argentina, this must be the least-common of the South Bend 9-inch copies. Although very much like the original in general appearance, there were a number of significant differences including: a hardened and ground bed, a mirror-image apron - with the controls transposed left to right; a screwcutting gearbox that appears to have been of rather altered design; a No. 4 Morse taper headstock spindle with a 25.4 mm bore (1-inch); bronze spindle bearings held in tapered housings with their ends threaded so that slotted rings (at each side) could be turned to adjust the clearance and a changewheel bracket with parallel instead of forked slots. Although the maker's figures gave the centre height as 4.5 inches, the thickness of the cross slide, together with what appears to be a deeper base to the top slide, would suggest that the real figure must be nearer to 5 inches.
After some calculations based on the threading chart, the screwcutting gearbox appears to have a cone of gears running from 32 through 36, 40, 44, 48, 52, 56, and 60 instead of the expected 16, 18, 20,
22, 24, 26, 28 and 30. The final gearing from the cone would be a 32t gear driving a 24t on the end of the 8 TPI leadscrew. Although it's not possible to see inside the box, it would be interesting to see how the "4-Square" selection for the left-hand lever works - although it's apparent that the marked sequence A-B-C-D divides the pitch by a factor of 2 as it advances.
Spindle speeds from the 1425 r.p.m. motor spanned 70 to 1400 r.p.m. Although Argentina is now a "metric" country (it adopted the SIMELA - Argentine legal metric system - as late as 1972) the screwcutting gearbox of this early 1950s lathe is an imperial unit - though in this case fitted with a 127t metric translation gear and a threading plate listing inch pitches from 4 to 120 t.p.i. and metric from 0.15 to 4.5 mm. Interestingly, for many years Argentina was a strong customer for all things British with many of the older power stations, railways and other elements of the country's infrastructure sourced from the UK..