If you feel like you suffer from a deja vu, well you're not entirely wrong. There used to be a Matra MDR2A in my life before, which thanks to a typo of the seller was called "Marta". As a result it only seemed apt to call the new Matra, Martha the second.
A bit of backstory to those Matra MDR2A lathes. They were heavily influenced by the American Regal LeBlond 10inch lathes, which were found as standard equipment on American WW2 vessels. The Matra with her 240mm swing over bed is a bit smaller. Now these weren't found on ships, but inside tank repair/service trucks. This also explains why a German made lathe can produce a stupidizillion of imperial threads, but only some of the most basic metric thread pitches. (To be fair, those cover about 90 percent of what's out there anyway.) With the step-by-step replacement of the WW2-era American M41 and M47 tanks, the tank-repair trucks also started to become obsolete and by the early 1960ies the German army retired these lathes and sold them off. There is also a civilian version of this lathe, but it doesn't carry the motor on top, but in a more conventional position behind the headstock and thus the casting is notably different.
So what I did is exactly what I tell everyone not to do. I bought a lathe sight unseen and asked a mate to pick it up and deliver it to me. (Luckily said friendly fella, who goes by the name of Torsten, also bought my old Rhino/Coronet and after about a week or two of arranging everything and a very friendly seller, everything worked about as smooth as one could hope for in a deal like this.)
As should be rather evident by the picture above, the lathe came without a suitable cabinet. For a plethora of reasons I chose the approach more akin to a certain Swedish furniture house.
In this picture the reinforcement bar was still missing, because I had to build the cabinet, whilst the lathe was still about 400km away from my workshop.
There's no pictures of the lathe being put up on the stand as that involved three people and a bit of swearing and as a result there was a distinct shortage of spare hands to take photos. Due to the nasty surprise with my last Matra, I checked the spindle nose and it is in pristine condition.
The following morning a slightly more in-depth assessment of the situation was undertaken. Just as the seller told me, it was used for woodwork the last few years. Overall the condition wasn't bad, but very dry. A bit of scotchbrite quickly dealt with the surface rust and a plenty bit of oil made sure it wouldn't come back quickly.
Especially the Norton box needed a lot of penetrating oil and then some regular engine oil to become movable again. Still not entirely sure, whether it wouldn't be a smart move to take the box off and clean it in some diesel.
Speaking of which, the lathe came with two lovely vintage Arowa chucks, a #3 and a #4. Unfortunately a mix of rust and wood-dust locked them up tight. A few days in diesel made them loose enough, so at least the jaws could be removed and the ways derusted and polished with a brass brush.
You can just about make out the amount of rust and crud stuck in those ways and this picture was taken after the first cleaning...
Now a lathe is not really much good without a motor. I chose a 2.2kW single-phase motor running at 2800rpm, mainly because I had two of them and I thought it would not give me much trouble... In comparison to the original switches backplate, this 3mm steel plate is almost flimsy, with the original being made of a casting with at least 6 or 7mm of thickness. In case you're wondering, why the switch is so much to the right, that's because I will need room for the direction-selector-switch later.
Looking good, eh? Well that electric motor wasn't. No matter how it was wired up, it would always trip the breaker.
Luckily I still had a Soviet-era Polish-made 1.5kW Wefamel single-phase motor sitting on a shelf and just as the paper said: "Made by the proud socialist workers of Poland to the highest standards". Not entirely sure what those standards actually are, but it works and is about twice as heavy as a modern electric motor with the same power rating.
... and as I did all the wiring I made sure that the motor and lathe are actually grounded, you know healthy and safety and all that, because electrocutions really spoil the day.
And there she is... in full glory...
... and running too!
All nice and good, but how well does she do her spinny-turny-thingy?
Any further questions? Because I don't. That is some lovely performance, the surface finish is almost like it's been polished, the swarf that came off was almost perfect and subsequent attempts that the old girl is not in the taking prisoners business.
So what's the plan in the near(-ish) future: First I have to get the thread-cutting gears set up for metric and then fabricate two new backplates for new (not yet bought) chucks. Nothing against those lovely Arowa chucks, but they've had their best days probably somewhere around 50 years ago. Other than that, the cabinet still needs some actual trays to put stuff in currently there's just a few planks resting on the bars to get some of the tooling out of the way. And lastly, the motor has to be rewired (again) for a direction-selector-switch so I don't have to turn the lathe back by hand, when thread cutting. Other than that it will see some more cleaning and an oil-change and mostly simply be used because it is in lovely condition and I see no reason to tear it apart just for curiosity's sake.
Oh and last but not least: Special thanks for Torsten for the logistics and quite literally "the heavy lifting", Raffi for even more lifting and Ralf for putting up with all the hassle that was involved to get the lathe from Germany to Austria without even exchanging a single word face to face.
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