One serious drawback to the Round-bed Drummond was the lack of low speeds, achieved on other lathes by a backgear assembly. Although the Drummond company are not believed to have offered a conversion there were third-party suppliers of such items - with the modification illustrated left being a particularly ingenious and well-engineered job with the assembly clamped to round the bed to both right and left of the headstock. The gears used appear to match the specification the standard changewheels. Interestingly, the amount of space left between the gears appears to be perfectly matched for the use of a standard 3-step "A" section V-belt pulley - leading one to surmise that this must have been a kit that was offered during the 1930s. Another conversion used an train of epicyclic gears built into the largest diameter of the headstock pulley - on the lines of a system incorporated in the American "AA Products" lathe sold by Sears under their Craftsman label as the Model AA109. For the Drummond at least two designs of epicyclic backgear were developed: the first, by George Gentry, being published in the "Model Engineer" magazine during 1912 and the second, by A. E. Bowyer-Lowe complete with illustrations and detailed drawings in the same magazine, on April 1st, 1915.

An early Round Bed fitted with another version of the bed clamp backgear assembly, V-belt drive (again, a perfect fit for the 3-step pulley) and, never seen before, a quite different design of tailstock that allowed a little more capacity between centres.

This version has each backgear bearing housing formed as a separate casting bolted and tennoned to its the bed-clamp section