Before Wade purchased the rights to the American Watch Tool Company's larger Bench Lathes in 1918 they were already making a backgeared and screwcutting lathe - the 8.5" x 24" Toolmaker's Model 8A. This was a beautiful machine, equal to Rivett's 8-inch Precision and 608 models for attention to detail and quality of fit and finish and an advance in terms of rigidity and capacity for rapid metal removal. Advertised as: "The ultimate in lathes for close precision work within its capacity" it had a swing of  8.5" (a centre height of 4.25") and iadmitted 24" between centres. For an 8" lathe the hardened and ground spindle was truly massive: it had a clear hole of 11/4" (later given as 13/16" in the sales literature) a generously-sized nose with a thread of  2" x 10 t.p.i. and was able to accept  "Wade No. 8" collets with a maximum through bore of  1".  Early versions employed traditional Wade plain hardened, ground and lapped steel bearings of the "watchmaker-lathe" type but later machines, from an indeterminate date sometime in the early 1930s, were fitted with what were called, in contemporary literature, "anti-friction" bearings; that immediately behind the spindle thread was a double-row roller bearing and, just back from that (and also contained within the front housing), was a precision ball thrust bearing; the rear of the spindle was supported in a deep-groove ball bearing. The bearings were set under a slight preload, to ensure that the spindle was held as rigidly as possible. On these lathes, when backgear was engaged, the cone pulley ran on its own long roller bearing. Both headstock and tailstock (the former with a short reduction sleeve) were fitted with No. 2 Morse taper centres.
Another wade Precision Bench Lathe, the No. 8, was listed alongside the 8A for a time but, upon the introduction of  lathes made by the Watch Tool Company, this model was dropped and only the fully-equipped 8A shown in the advertising literature.
The customer for the 8A was given the choice of either a hardened and ground bed - or one which was left in its natural state then hand-scraped and "spotted".  Originally available just for bench mounting, later machines were fitted to oak and then, post WW2, much stronger steel cabinet stands. The drive systems varied according to the times with first a traditional overhead countershaft unit (though beautifully constructed on cast-iron uprights) and then with the option of a neat, under-drive stand that still employed a flat-belt drive but, like the Schaublin 102, offered a belt-shifting mechanism that allowed speeds to be swapped without stopping the motor. In the 1950s, in an effort to modernise the lathe, it was offered with a mechanical infinitely-variable-speed drive of the type that used a wide "V-belt" and expanding and contracting pulleys (controlled by a wheel on the front face of the stand marked "slow" and "fast"); because there were no belt positions to indicate the spindle speed this model was fitted with a rather fine-looking but rather large electric tachometer on the front face of the headstock. Most lathes offered by the factory fitted to self-contained benches had 2-speed 3-phase motors that, in combination with backgear, gave a total of 12 spindle speeds. A later development was the fitting of a motor at the tailstock end of the bed that provided a variable-speed electrical drive to the power sliding and surfacing feed - so rivalling, for a time, the facilities offered on a Hardinge HLV lathe.
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The bed, made from a hardened and ground close-grained alloyed iron, was in the shape of a hollow square in cross section with cross ribs to add strength and rigidity. The front way was especially wide and the wings of the saddle over eleven inches long - producing a bearing surface greater than on many much larger machines. The saddle was gibbed to the bed at both front - with a long taper and adjusting screw - and the back; the tailstock and headstock were located on separate ways. The front way, with a steeper than usual inside angle to better absorb tool thrust, and a wider outside to spread the wearing load, was probably a Wade design and appears to have been the world's first use of this widely-copied idea.
The compound slide was a thing of beauty with, according to users, a silky-smooth action and an ability to feed back exactly what was happening at the cutting edge. Some later models were fitted with a longer cross slide incorporating two rear-mounted T-slots esigned to hold a parting-off tool in an inverted position.
Wade claimed very high standards of accuracy for the lathe: the taper hole in the nose of the spindle, and the chuck seat on the outside, concentric and true to within 0.00001". The spindle alignment with the guideways on the bed, carriage and tailstock to within a tolerance of 0.003" over 12" and a facing cut made across 8" in diameter would produce a surface within 0.0002" concave and 0.0000" convex.
The tailstock was of the offset type and fitted with a 1" diameter, hardened, ground and lapped spindle carrying a No. 2 Morse taper. The barrel was designed so that, even when extended to the maximum of its 3.25" travel by the Acme-form screw, it was still fully supported within the main casting. The spindle was engraved with 1/16th.-inch scales, fitted with a micrometer dial and included a self-eject mechanism for the centre. The locking clamp was of the internal, compression-barrel type, designed to minimise any deflection of the spindle as it was tightened.
The quick-change screwcutting gearbox was able to generate 32 pitches without changing or moving any of the all-steel drive gears, whilst additional changewheels were available to cut any thread, including metric - the change of gear was on one hardened and ground stud only - mounted on a swinging bracket within the gear-guard case.
The makers guaranteed that, in any thread cutting operation, the overall pitch error for any foot of length would not exceed plus or minus 0.0005" whilst on a thread 12" long any three consecutive inches would be within plus or minus 0.0003".
Interestingly, an example has been found of a 10-inch swing 8A; probably a one-off, special-order machine it was delivered in the 1940s to the Los Alamos National Research Laboratories in New Mexico, USA. The comments of a delighted and impressed Wade 8A owner can be found here.
Known serial numbers for the 8A are:
1919…... 160
1927…... 203
1940…... 220
1941……247
1942……330
1946……500
1949……600
1957……800
1958…...850
1959 discontinued
Like many other machine tools the Wade 8A was also sold badged as a "Do-All" - although the marketing exercise could have fooled few people at the time, today it can lead to amusing confusion.
If you have a Wade 8A the author would be pleased to hear from you.
A Wade 8 enthusiast is developing a site devoted to these lathes at: www.wade8a.com

Visible in this picture of an early machine is the extra-wide front way with its steep inside angle - possibly the first time that this design (which was to be widely copied) was used.