Hello all,

Just hello from me.

I have come across this wonderful forum looking for information about lathes and lathe restoration.

Well this evening my first lathe for restoration turned up. A Colchester Student Mk2, it will need a full strip down and rebuild with new paint, gaskets and at the same time will replace any worn parts like bearings.

I am 32 years old and work in cyber security but previous to this career I worked in a classic car restorers for a long time and this is what most of my tools and workshop orientate around.

I have a pretty decent mig welder and know how to use it. A nice 150 litre air compressor with a decent 14cfm which also connects upto my shot blasting cabinet. I also have various tools for working on older cars.

I have always wanted a lathe but did not want to buy something new as my budget was less than 1k and I always liked using the Colchester at my school.

I am going to post some questions on another thread but I hope to do a nice rebuild diary on the Colchester Student mk2, I am used to restoring classic cars to concourse standards and I plan on putting the same effort into this lathe. Then after the lathe I want to do the same to a nice old milling machine.

Cheers

Gareth

Hi Neil, I have posted a photo of how it stands now along with some questions in the beginners section of the forum, however I do plan on photos and videos of progress throughout.

**LINK**

Hi Brian, the local Vicar in the village I worked in had a nice little 1931 austin 7 that had been turned into a 2 seater boat tail sports car. From what he told me this was something that was done very early in its life as it was a rare coach built thing. I have never worked on a 7 but I have worked on a lovely austin 10 lichfield and outside of the work environment helped out on the much larger but rather rare austin 18.

Gareth.

Thank you Chris, mine looks like it had a fibre glass cover as there are bits of it all over the place. Glad to hear there are plenty of Motorbike and car people here.