Of the 'front-way' type, this 4-inch centre height, backgeared and screwcutting lathe is resident in Canada. Nothing is known of its origin and is, so far, the only one whose discovery has been made public. 'Front-way' lathes are those where the carriage slides not on just the top surface of the bed, but on a combination of the top and front or - like the example below - just the front. The number of makers ever to offer a lathe made in this form is limited, but does includ the Rivett 8-inch precision and later 608, the unusual Porter-CablePearce from New York (with not a single known surviving example) and those attributed to Wade, Ballou, Nathan English and George Ballou. Japan appears to have made one example, the Toyo ML1, while from England came the lathe of machine-tool pioneer Richards Roberts (a well-preserved example is in the London Science museum) and those by James Spencer, Birch and Rolls Royce.
While preserved in working order, the condition of the No.129 Unknown does suggest that it may once have had additional features, castings having a number of tapped holes that have no obvious function. Even though a number of accessories accompanied the lathe when it was found, these appear to be of a more recent home-made type, the T-slotted cross and milling slides both having T-slots built up from strips of metal held on with cap-head screws.
Built on a gap-less bed of great depth and braced by internal walls, the bed has a V and two flat way on its top face and, on the front, a flat forward-facing way at the top together with a pair of narrow V-ways beneath - one at the top, the other at the bottom. While all the front ways were dedicated to supporting the carriage - with the V and one flat way on top used to guide the tailstock and located the headstock - the lathe was still fitted with a saddle, this appearing to slide on the front and back flat ways on the bed's top face. If this is the case, the accuracy needed to ensure that all six faces supporting the carriage were in the correct relationship must have been considerable. As a contrast, the Spencer front-way lathe used only the front face of the bed for the carriage, the cross slide having sufficient travel for a tool to reach the spindle line without the need for any form of saddle to be provided.