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4C Lathe
1920s Lathes Catalog

By the 1920s the Hendey lathe range consisted of both flat-belt drive and geared-head machines and, while the former were still expected to be driven from overhead-line shafting, the geared-head lathes were increasingly driven from attached motors. Today, the idea of a machine tool without its own drive motor seems a strange anachronism but, for many years, there was a considerable resistance to spending extra money on such a system - and rightly so, for if your factory already contained a single, large, steam or gas engine, capable of running the entire plant, what was the need ? Unfortunately, such factories were very difficult to rearrange for efficient production flow, and the engineering business that invested in self-contained machines soon found itself able to streamline production by juggling machine positions to optimise work-feed, transfer and handling times. Self-contained machine tools had other advantages too - to compensate for improving or worsening trade conditions extra machines could be set to work in bare rooms with just an electricity supply or the entire plant relocated to a cheaper area and production restarted almost immediately - it does not take much imagination to realise the enormous delay caused by having to dismantle and rebuilt an entire power plant together with its complex, ceiling-mounted line shafting system. 
Some makers - South Bend amongst them - did offer cone-drive lathes with integral drives, but it took some time before a satisfactory design evolved; often the motors were perched on top of the headstock, driving the spindle though either a short flat belt (the shortness of the belt caused problems) or one of a variety of underdeveloped link-belt or chain drives.
During the long changeover to self-contained machines, the Hendey catalogs were rather vague about what was on offer, it being apparent that when a customer was adding between 50% and 75% to the cost of his new machinery, he would want some say in how the drive was to be arranged and the form that it took.  The first Hendey electric drives were mounted above the headstock on specially-constructed covers which had cast-in pads to accept the motor-mounting base or feet; at first (the V belt had yet to be invented) the motors were either directly geared to the headstock or a form of expensive "silent chain" employed. Flat belts could also be specified - notwithstanding their diminished performance when asked to run on very short centres. In the case of motors with a gear on their shaft coupled directly to a gear on the headstock drive shaft the problem of backlash and noise caused some makers - and probably Hendey too - to experiment with fibre and other forms of "soft" gears in an attempt to overcome the problem.
All Hendey self-contained lathes benefited from the installation of a well-designed and reliable clutch mounted on the outer end of the headstock-drive shaft, with control levers mounted conveniently on both headstock and carriage. Motors could be either AC or DC, both being offered with various types of speed control of greater or lesser efficiency..

Rear view of the "all-gear" drive clearly showing the specially-cast headstock cover, the run of the motor-control operating rods and the clutch-control mechanism.