Help on pricing a used lathe

G

glynn angle

Member
I'm not a machinist although I'm a woodworker. A friend handles a lot of estate sales & I went went with him this morning to help price a LOT (garage full) of woodworking & metalworking equipment. There was too much to really see in a short time this morning while the son of the deceased owner paced around. My friend will be allowed to price & sell all this machinery. The son has no knowledge or interest in any of this equipment. Among several metalworking machines were a Rockwell Delta 11" X 21" lathe with two chucks and some tooling. Also a Hardinge Milling Machine with a very good crossfeed & some interesting attachments. Other items included a surface Grinder (could not find a name). These machines are bolted on good bases and the milling machine in particular has some surface rust. They all seem in decent shape & I believe the owner was mostly a collector as the building was too crowded to do much actual work. I'm trying to set a fair price on the lathe & milling machine for a expedited sale. He plans a 2 day (weekend sale in August) but would sell the larger pieces before then. My friend will be working on a % and is not haggling to get the last $. Thanks for any help.
 
Look on ebay and see if you can find similar machines to help determine pricing. There are lots of machine tools for sale on ebay. Also look at machinetools.com or usedequip.com and other machine tool sites.
 
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Thanks Mike, I know I didn't give you a lot to go on. My friend has very limited access to this equipment & of course the price will quite likely be much lower because we can't give full details.
 
You'd be surprised what work can be done in a garage packed with machinery. Although I never went to Don Rorshach's shop a machinist friend of mine did. He said that machinery was packed into his garage very tightly with just enough room to walk from one machine to the next. Don was a premier bullet making die manufacturer at the time and made dies in his spare time after serving as the Irving, TX city attorney as his day job.
 
Butch Lambert said:
A Rockwell lathe makes an excellent gunsmithing lathe.
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Thanks Butch, I've been thinking about that. It's not as large & heavy as the one you had delivered to your shop recently but it's not a lightweight either. It, along with the other equipment, sits in a shop in the back yard of a pristine home. No driveway exist to get to the shop just a perfect lawn with an underground sprinkler system. The son (he inherited all this, including the home) doesn't want any damage to the lawn. I can buy a 2-ton engine hoist for about $200. I have a fairly low trailer that will carry 1500 lbs. I would only have to haul the machine 5 miles to my home. I don't know what it weighs, but I'm guessing under 1,500 lbs. Of course if I don't buy it I won't have to worry about all that. I think the Sale will happen in a few weeks. They hope to sell everything (an unbelievable amount of equipment) in one weekend!
 
Use a floor jack and lift it one end at a time so that you can get two 4x4's under it lengthways. Lag lathe to 4x4,s and then roll it on 3/4" or 1" pipe. You can roll it right up a trailer ramp using a come-a-long. If you need to go accross soft ground, just lay some plywood down and move the sheets and rolleres as you go. We move old machines all the time this way.
 
Glenn, milgunsmith is correct. When I bought my shop we used plywood. I believe the Rockwell is around 900lbs. Several gunsmiths have these and they work real well. There is a Rockwell forum on the web.
 
stool said:
i bought 1" black pipe to roll mine on....
i tied the lathe to a door frame, and drove the trailer out from under it.( sitting on plywood with pipe rollers)...
then just rolled it around the garage to where i wanted it,,,,,
used a 3 ton floor jack to lift with.
and it weighs 2000 lbs......
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Thanks guys, seems like something I can manage.
 
Since they are so top heavy be sure to keep your body parts away from the danger zone because it will fall very fast. And dont try to stop it. I move machines alot with an engine hoist and spreader bars on lathes. I hate twisted beds.
 
Dusty Stevens said:
Since they are so top heavy be sure to keep your body parts away from the danger zone because it will fall very fast. And dont try to stop it. I move machines alot with an engine hoist and spreader bars on lathes. I hate twisted beds.
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Thanks Dusty, some years ago I knew a fellow who was an expert at restoring very large woodworking machines. He was killed by an accident while removing a large machine from a flatbed truck!
 
I just want everybody to stop and think about every possibility before putting themselves in harms way. I work in the power industry and see lots get injured and killed doing every day activities. They were just in the wrong place for a split second. We had a rotor fall last year and killed a guy on a different floor- didnt even know they were lifting above him. Force of over a million lbs crashed the whole nuclear spec building below.
 
I used to move

Dusty Stevens said:
I just want everybody to stop and think about every possibility before putting themselves in harms way. I work in the power industry and see lots get injured and killed doing every day activities. They were just in the wrong place for a split second. We had a rotor fall last year and killed a guy on a different floor- didnt even know they were lifting above him. Force of over a million lbs crashed the whole nuclear spec building below.
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very large web printing presses. I know of the kind of accident Dusty is referring to. You CANNOT be too careful. I had a guy killed when he tried to grab a press going out a third story loading door and he was flipped out the door, even though the press only moved 1 foot "uncontrolled". 20K pounds moving that way is one hell of a lot of inertia. He was thrown over 50 feet beyond the crane.
 
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