This Prazisions Mechaniker-Drebank - which translates as "Precision Mechanics' Lathe", is known to have been offered during the 1940s and into the early 1950s. Even so, the design of this Type MD points to a machine that would have been first sold during the 1930s - and the use of V-belt drive is almost all that distinguishes it from one that could have been on sale twenty years earlier.
Of around 100 mm centre height and taking perhaps 300 mm between centres, the lathe was backgeared and screwcutting - the changewheels for the latter passing through a substantially-built tumble-reverse mechanism. From the only known sales sheet, it appears that fifteen changewheels were supplied as standard, this number suggesting that a couple of them might have been transposing gears to generate Whitworth (inch) pitches.
Of what might be called the traditional English small-lathe type, the bed had separate flat-topped, V-edged ways, but unfortunately lacked a gap.
Fitted with guards over the backgears, the headstock had a spindle running in what must have been plain bronze bearings, with clearances adjustable by pin-spanner rings.
With its ways and cross-feed screw open and so exposed to swarf, the compound slide rest assembly was of a distinctly old-fashioned arrangement with small-diameter micrometer dials and a simple, triangular clamp-type toolpost. The carriage was moved along the bed by a full-circle handwheel that, while it might have had finger cut-outs, lacked a handle - a sure-fire way for the operator's oily hand to slip while attempting a decent depth of hand-fed cut. From the position of the handwheel, low down on the face of the apron, the gearing to the bed-mounted rack would have passed through a train of reduction gears, so perhaps the writer's criticism of the handwheel is somewhat unfounded.
Another cost-saving feature - and a strange option for a company of Liebert & Gürtler standing - was the use of a direct-action screw to lock the tailstock spindle. In defence of this arrangement, at least the casting was not split and closed down onto the spindle by a bolt, this being the crudest and most objectionable of arrangements.
Although the lathe was clearly built down to a price, at least a solidly-built countershaft was provided with, on the maker's stand-mounted version, the position of the electric motor adjustable on T-slotted rails.
Although a very much less expensive product, in some respects the Liebert & Gürtler mechanics' lathe loosely resembles examples of precision plain-turning types from Auerbach, whose early models continued to be made into the 1950s. Another comparison would be with the English "Revised Zyto", another lathe current during the late 1930s..