Well regarded in the decades spanning the 19th and 20th centuries - the company was founded in 1875 and lasted until the late 1920s - the Flather Company, of Nashua, New Hampshire, USA specialised in lathes. Their most famous machine was the "circular" gearbox "Engine lathe", a type patented by Mr. Flather in April, 1895. However, not being known as a maker of small machines, the little 7-inch swing (3.5-inch centre height) model shown here is very rare. If Flather, like South Bend during their early years of production, used a set of sequential serial numbers, then this example would have been made around 1907. However, this is unlikely, it has so many advanced features that it is more likely to be from the post 1914 era, and probably from the early to mid 1920s. No lightweight special for the amateur, this was a lathe with its specification and detail design carefully thought out and every major component massively built. Looking remarkably like a scaled-down larger lathe, for its size and time this was indeed a good, solid job intended for serious professional use in a busy workshop.
Enormously long and rigidly constructed, the headstock held a 3/4" bore spindle (with a relatively small 13/8" x 12 t.p.i. nose thread) running in parallel-bore bronze bearings retained by 2-bolt caps. The bearings were lubricated through simple but reliable twist-to-open "Winkley" oilers, a Detroit-manufactured item found in world-wide use on almost every conceivable type of mechanical device. Also constructed to a standard well beyond what might have been expected, the 3-step headstock pulley took 1.25-inch wide belt and the 12 D.P. backgears were a full 1-inch wide - and obviously capable of sustained hard use. The bull-wheel had a handy spring-loaded, knurled-edge engagement pin that, with a pull and a twist, could be made to snap into and out of engagement with the cone pulley.
Interestingly, several aspects of the lathe were Dalton-like in their detail: the backgears and their arrangement; the particularly fine pitch (20 D.P.) changewheels (these even carrying the same form of casting number) and their (Dalton patent) method of retention by quickly-detachable threadless fasteners. These similarities might well have been the result simple copying, some loose arrangement between the companies or, even a possibility, of Dalton building a lathe for Flather to brand as their own.
Unusually wide and with substantial V and flat ways, the bed had its underside parallel to the top (there was no fancy Victorian embellishment of curves) and two long cast-in feet at each end. With the ways arranged to continue for some distance past the front face of the headstock, the heavy saddle was able to be moved so that the cross slide (centrally positioned on the saddle) came right up to the spindle nose. Judging by the large, full-length T slot running down the back of the bed, a taper-turning unit might well have been fitted as standard - a useful feature in the days when such a lathe would have been called upon to perform a wide variety of tasks. To engage the unit, instead of the operator having to dismantle the cross-feed screw and nut, or employ a handy but expensive-to-produce telescopic screw and nut assembly, Flather used an ordinary screw (contained within the usual kind of housing) with the assembly held in place not by bolts or grub screws, but by a simple tab sliding in a vertical slot cut into the face of the saddle. The tab, secured by a hardened square-headed bolt, engaged with a cut-out in the underside of the cross-feed housing and held it in place. To engage the taper unit, was tab was slid downwards, so freeing the cross slide screw assembly and allowing it to move with the action of the slide. The arrangement also included a useful built-in threading stop and, because the feed screw was still attached to the cross slide, negated the need to use the top slide for tool feed.
Continued below: