email: tony@lathes.co.uk
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Whitworth
(Armstrong-Whitworth) Lathes

Founded by William Armstrong in 1847, the original company was to become Armstrong Mitchell and then, through a series of mergers, Armstrong Whitworth. In 1927, it merged with Vickers Ltd. to form Vickers-Armstrong, though with its automobile and aircraft interests purchased by J. D. Siddeley.
During the first half of the 20th century, Sir W. G. Armstrong Whitworth & Co. Ltd. was a very important and influential British engineering company. Similar in organisation to Niles in America, they were remarkable not only for the quality of what they produced, but also its variety: battleships, massive guns and forgings of all types, railway engines, aircraft, cars, machine tools and, with their integrated organisation, the ability to build and fit-out entire factories to manufacture almost any large industrial product as well as munitions. However, while they constructed many huge, special-purpose lathes (many to make battleship guns) smaller versions could only have been of minor interest to them. Today, any machine tool marked Armstrong Whitworth is very rare - and few have survived.
One interesting and distinctive feature of many early Whitworth lathes was the joining of the front and back legs to form a triangulated structure - as seen in the 10th picture below.
If you have an Armstrong Whitworth lathe, the writer would be very interested indeed to hear from you.
The story of the company and its many impressive achievements makes for sobering reading when contrasted with the state of today's British industry
If you have an Armstrong Whitworth lathe, the writer would be very interested indeed to hear from you.
The story of the company and its many impressive achievements makes for sobering reading when contrasted with the state of today's British industry


Dating from 1914 to circa 1920, this Armstrong Whitworth lathe is of approximately 6.5-inch centre height and 36 inches between centres. For the time - with its clutched, all-geared headstock, Norton-type quick-change screwcutting gearbox, integral motor mounting and separate shaft drive for the power sliding and surfacing feeds - this would have been an up-to-date and very effective lathe.


A massive 50-inch (1270 mm) centre height gun lathe from 1913


A powerful 12-inch centre height lathe as made in 1905

Another product offered in the one of the company's 1905 catalogues

A special-purpose lathe made in 1903


The only known example of a small Whitworth lathe, a very heavily-built, simply plain-turning type fitted with a lever-action tailstock. Probably with a 3.5" centre height, the lathe is in France and judging by its general appearance might have been built as early as 1880.


Probably from the 1920s, the 6.6-inch centre height Whitworth lathe has a single flat input pulley to the headstock drive this arrangement suggesting drive from an overhead lineshaft system. The input drive that appears to be fitted with an outboard-mounted clutch. For such a lathe the top speed



Armstrong-Whitworth gun-boring and turning works at Elswick in 1898

Whitworth (Armstrong-Whitworth) Lathes
email: tony@lathes.co.uk
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