Colchester Student.. should I scrap it?

[wilson logan 1Participant @wilsonlogan1]

Hi All,

My first lathe was a Colchester Student.  I now have a Bantam and I repurposed the Student to grinding duties.

A friend has offered me a J&S surface grinder that would fit in the spot the Student currently occupies.

Normally I’d just sell the Student but it has seen much better days.

Plus points… the head is perfect. Nose runout below surface roughness of nose. All the gears work. All the feeds work. It has imperial & metric cross slides and imperial and metric leadscrews, a full set of change gears, fixed and travelling steadies, faceplate, 3 jaw and 4 jaw chucks. The half nut is new as, inexplicably, it came without one.

Bad points… the bed is done.  It was used (before I got it) to chamfer pipes with some sort of grinder and no attempt to shield the ways was taken.

I think there might be a 40 thou drop from front to back and most of that is right up next to the chuck where you’d not want it. Drilling small holes (under 2mm) isn’t possible as the tailstock is no longer at the correct height close to the chuck and even larger drills feel the pain.

So, the options look like…

1) Scrap it in total.

2) Remove everything that’s good and scrap the bed & stand.

3) Sell it as is.

What do you guys think?

Cheers,

Wilson.

[HopperParticipant @hopper]

If there is in fact a measured 40 thou wear on the bed, it is probably Ritz crackered beyond economical regrinding. So you probably won’t get top price for selling it as is. Someone may buy it for the many other parts on it that are still good though, at a reduced price of course.

But with the price of Colchester parts, it could be worth selling all those parts on eBay, HomeWorkShop site etc yourself. Which of course takes a lot of time and effort in posting ads, packing and sending and dealing with the paperwork and fees. And all the while you are tripping over half a shed full of Colchester parts.

Depends on how important the money is to you, vs the time to part it out vs the inconvenience space-wise.

I very, very definitely would not scrap a Colchester though. Somebody somewhere will buy it. And any sale price is going to be better than the scrap value. Parts for this sort of old Brit iron are getting rarer and rarer and prices reflect that.

Besides, it would be a crying shame to see the old girl go down the gurgler.

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi Wilson, sell it as is under spares/repair, someone may well have the bed reground, and then refurbish the rest, and it would save you stripping it down and posting several sales.

Regards Nick.

[Clive FosterParticipant @clivefoster55965]

The problem with self breaking and selling the parts is that you generally can’t shift everything so you still have a fair bit of disposal to do. By the time you’ve shipped off what you do sell the £sd return is unlikely to be very good compensation for the time and effort involved.

It’s also important to consider where the market for parts could be. Good headstock sounds great but by the time a Colchester headstock is worn badly enough to need replacing the rest of the machine is likely to be toast. So they pool of potential buyers will come from those suffering catastrophic accidents. Small pond. Similarly folk wanting parts will mostly be repairing that one or two things that need fixing. Not wholesale changes. Thinks like a feedscrew, feed nut, dial or that handle wot got broke. Little of great value generally.

Best option is spares repairs or pull off a few likely E-Bay sales candidate parts and call the scrap man.

Unlike Hopper I don’t have any nostalgia for Colchesters. An affordable machine able to do a decent job until worn out when it should be disposed of. Generally survivors seem to have started off in low intensity service or training workshops and stayed clear of factory floor continuous work. So relatively low hours and still in good condition. Seem to be enough of those around to pretty much saturate the home shop and remaining low intensity workshops. Which doesn’t help the parts market.

Clive

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

There was a Colchester Student Roundhead on eBay this week. It was the change-wheel model with no screw-cutting gearbox but it looked in reasonable cosmetic condition for its age. The was a 3-Jaw chuck, a Burnerd Tru-Grip chuck with a full set of collets, a faceplate and draw full of reamers etc. with it. Apparently, the seller, who knew absolutely nothing about lathes, found it abandoned in the garage of a property they had moved into and put it up on eBay just to get rid of it. It went for £195 and that was after 14 bids! Unbelievable, the chucks alone are worth twice that. Somebody, somewhere certainly got a bargain today.

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