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Bob,
As long as you brought up the subject, the lathe I was trying to think about was a Hardinge HLV Super Precision Lathe. It can run from 125 rpm up to 3000 rpm, has a spindle runout of no more than .000025 inches, weighs 2,250 pounds, has a 5hp 3 phase motor and costs $52,000.00 dollars. In my view it is far and away the finest lathe ever made. I used to cut a lot of bearing journals and with this lathe I could just dial the cutter in and count on the cut being within 1/10,000 of and inch. When I would do the same job on other lathes I would have to use emery paper to achieve a similar degree of precision. You could put a steel rod in this thing and machine it down to the diameter of a sewing needle without an end or follower support. For some reason the watch trade seems to favor the Schaublin for a toolroom size lathe. The Schaublin is very nice but the Hardinge is a better machine. After seeing the Swiss Machines at the Chicago tool show that actually make watch parts I was suprised that they were large heavy machines. There was one lathe that had a huge coil of wire feeding into the back of the machine and it would turn and spit out tiny watch pivots into a basket every few seconds. The lathe was at least the size of a small car.
david