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Ames Lathes
Stands and Drive Systems
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The Ames lathe could be driven by a conventional wall or ceiling mounted flat-belt drive countershaft unit, the layout drawing for which are at the bottom of this page, or fitted to a 48" long, 25" wide and 36" self-contained and rather elegant cabinet with a 3-speed gearbox. The stand was sturdily constructed from oak with a top surface edged with hardwood and covered in thick linoleum - an early form of plastic flooring very familiar to an "earlier generation". Two cast-iron uprights carried a cross member in hardwood on which was mounted the speed-change gearbox and, optionally, a drive for grinding and milling attachments carried on the lathe's top slide.
A 0.5 hp motor was fitted in the left-hand compartment, behind two doors, and the stand was either cut away on the right-hand side to allow space for the operator to sit down whilst working - or fitted with a nest of drawers. The motor drove upwards to the gearbox, the front of which was removable; inside the casing were three sets of constantly-meshed helical gears, running within an oil-tight bath and each fitted with a heavily-built steel friction cone clutch that allowed an instantaneous change of speed.
The drive from the motor entered from a 7" diameter pulley on the lower shaft and passed, via the gears and clutches, to an upper shaft that carried a cone pulley to match that of the lathe beneath it. Unusually for a countershaft of this era, the shafts ran on double-row ball races whilst the clutch thrust bearing was also of the ball bearing type.
The clutches were controlled by foot pedals, connected by wires to the engagement mechanism.
Later stands were built on heavy, pressed steel legs with linoleum-covered, hard-wood faced wooden tops and used an underdrive system with either a 3-speed gearbox or a mechanical infinitely variable-speed unit.

Early Ames No. 3 lathe on the oak cabinet stand with 3-speed gearbox drive

By the 1930s the No. 3 lathe was mounted on the AB1000 stand with heavy pressed steel legs and a much more compact and efficient 3-speed gearbox drive system.

The standard two-speed countershaft offered from the earliest days of the Ames Precision Bench Lathe. The unit was described as being of the "Wall Rod" type and was designed to overcome the limitations of traditional countershafts were the wall brackets also formed the supports for the pulley spindles. The system relied upon two 1-inch diameter cold-rolled steel bars set 4 inches apart that connected together two cast-iron wall brackets. The castings that held the self-aligning bearings for the 3/4"-diameter ground finished pulley spindle were separate units and could be easily and independently slid along the bars until the drive and driven pulley were in line with their respective mates both above and below. In the picture above the two pulleys to the left are both of the "tight and loose" (UK fast-and-loose) kind where one pulley was free to rotate on the shaft (the idle pulley) and the other fastened to it (the drive pulley). By operating a foot pedal the machine operator could cause a striker rod on either the larger (7") or smaller (5") pulley to flick the belt across from idle to drive and so change the speed from a high of 720 rpm to a low of 160 rpm. Despite some makers offering an interconnecting control that pushed one belt back  onto its idle pulley before moving the other, Ames appears not to have offered this refinement on their countershafts. Although the unit could be used as a stand-alone fitting it was really designed to be connected together in multiples along one wall - all joined by long steel rods - and drive a number of lathes and milling machines from one power source. The countershaft
As an alternative, a "three-speed" countershaft was offered that gave the same high and low forward speeds as the ordinary unit plus, by means of an additional twisted belt, one reverse speed of 160 rpm.

The "3-speed" countershaft with an extra fast-and-loose pulley to provide a reverse drive

For grinding and high-speed cutter work some means of driving at high speed was required and for this Ames offered the above attachment. It consisted of an extra pulley alongside the 3-step on the ordinary "Wall Rod" countershaft together with a pair of cast angle brackets (mounted on the top rod and a third rod above)  that carried a very large diameter "gut" round-rope drive pulley.

Never mind the lathe, look how it's driven ………..
A schematic diagram to help the installation of an Ames lathe with an "instant-change" countershaft unit and ceiling-mounted electric motor.
The complexity, cost and time required to assemble and set up this type of drive forced manufactures to design compact, self-contained stands of the type shown at the top of the page - and which can also be seen in that used by Cataract for their bench lathe.