With a rather unfortunate name, the Fuking lathe was manufactured in China. The example shown is in Australia, where the Fukung brand and trademark was registered in March 1983 by the Shanghai Machinery Import and Export Corporation.
After the redoubtable South Bend 9-inch Workshop lathe - of which 17 copies have been identified - the Myford Series 7 lathes, both the ML7 and Super 7, might fall into second place as the world's most copied small lathe with 14 examples found. However, the Emco Compact 8 has also be widely replicated - usually by Taiwanese makers - though, in this case, often with several useful improvements to its specification.
Instead of the headstock spindle running in a tapered bronze bush at the front and a pair of ball races at the rear, the Fuking used taper roller bearings at both ends - an easy and cheaper arrangement to engineer than the original. The countershaft looks to be home-made, the bearings being Australian-made SKF rollers.
The cross slide and top slide are not of the somewhat more complicated Super 7 type but copies of those used on the ML7 with the hard-to-adjust gib 'blocks' of the Super 7 replaced by the simple gib strip.
The large diameter leadscrew appears to be the same as that on the Super 7, but the support bracket at the tailstock end of the bed lacks the two locating dowels of the original.
Both the screwcutting changewheels and the tumble-reverse gears appear to be of a coarser pitch than the Myford type, though in the case of the steel tumble gears this might be no bad thing - even if they would have run more noisily than the originals in Tufnol. One minor but valuable improvement on the Fukung was the incorporation of a micrometer dial on the tailstock feed screw, something that Myford never got around to fitting or even offered as an accessory..