According to the lathes.co.uk site,

"The spindle was bored through to clear 26 mm, fitted with a 4 Morse nose and came with a choice of a B.S.4442-A3 or (at extra cost) a D1-3" camlock nose as commonly used on small industrial lathes. Both fittings allowed accessories to be mounted close to the front bearing with the minimum of overhand and, while the B.S. nose required chucks and backplates with 3 inconvenient studs and nuts to fasten them in place, at least it uses the same tapered spigot as the more convenient D1 fitting and so allows accessories to be made or adapted with comparative ease should factory parts ever dry up. "

Hi

PM sent

Olly

Hello all,

Also completely new here, and to lathes as a whole, so please be gentle! I’m in the same boat as @putneyman 10 years ago – I’ve bought a Myford 254s with the non-camlock spindle. Was this solved? It’s come with both 3 and 4 jaw scrolling 125mm chucks, but I’d like (a) a larger 180+mm 4 jaw independent and (b) a 200ish mm faceplate, which I’m finding very difficult to source. If I understand the info from lathes.co.uk correctly the solution seems to be to purchase D1-3 chucks/plates and remove the camlock studs, replace them with 9/16 threaded bar, and everything should come together. It’s an expensive process if I’m wrong though – can anyone shed any light? @oldschool posted a PM above but I’m not sure what the outcome of that was. Thanks, Dominic.

Thanks Duncan, that makes sense. Mine’s metric too and the studs as they go through the spindle flange are indeed M10. Good idea on modding bolts to mate into the D1-3 stud holes.

I’ll hold off attacking it in case anyone has a definitive answer on the D1-3 compatibility (particularly taper fit, and bolt circle?) but off to a good start… cheers.

I have recently gone in the opposite direction, buying a used Myford 254 specific 7″ Pratt Burnerd 4-jaw chuck, taken from a non-camlock machine, and modifying it to use on my camlock 254. The [intergral] back plate already had provision for the cam stud ‘locking’ set screws so I simply extracted the threaded mounting studs, substituted them with the correct cam lock studs and added some securing set screws. It then fitted my camlock spindle perfectly.

I therefore can see no reason why a D1-3 backplate could not just have the set screws and cam studs extracted and threaded fittings inserted into the stud tappings, as already advised. There is, however, one further wrinkle: PB and the like use imperial threaded camlock studs whereas Chinese D1-3 fittings from Warco, RDG etc use metric threads for the studs. I suspect that the latter would make life easier in the longer term.

Best of luck with the 254; I have never regretted buying mine.