Dear Sir:

It was a pleasant surprise to discover your website, the more so to find mention of what will always be my favorite machine. I acquired two Wade 8A lathes as virtual basket cases circa 1973. The Wade company was still in business at the time, so I was able to obtain an original operator's manual complete with assembly drawings, which was of great value in the restoration of the machines. Ordered in 1942 by the International Harvester Co., they were (like many other machine tools) diverted for wartime use, in this case to the Naval Gun Factory in Washington DC. When I bought them they were in crates and had been given a cursory coating of Cosmoline packing grease. They had been built on beautiful varnished oak cabinets with butcher-block tops, which was a military specification still in effect in '42 before wartime necessity (and common sense) took over. I will never forget wiping off the cosmo with its twenty years' dust and discovering that the entire bed castings were ground and frosted.
In 1974 I got married and bought a house with a full-size basement, ideal for a home machine shop. I converted the drives to single-phase and eliminated the flying belt shifter, which was a nicely designed mechanism but never worked properly. Along the way I disassembled every nut, bolt, and bearing and did a complete mechanical restoration including re-scraping ways and saddle, and relining the bore of the interlock bolt (a bronze wear-prone piece that prevented simultaneous engagement of clutch and half-nut--Wade kindly furnished a print of the part).
As time went on and my fledgling company outgrew its quarters (along with my first marriage) the lathes were moved to a leased facility in an industrial park in Beltsville, Maryland.
I had recognized early on that their design was basically the same as the well-known Hardinge toolroom lathe (which I had learned on as an apprentice at an aerospace contractor) and that with some modern tooling they could be more productive than even the designers had anticipated. A purist would probably view this with some repugnance, but I mounted collet closers to the machines by drilling and tapping a hole in the rear arm of the back-gear casting, and back-boring the spindle to allow the draw tube to reach the more modern (but shorter) 5C collets, which had the same other dimensions as the original Wade collets. Quick-change tooling and re-conversion back to three-phase completed the job, and turned those two little lathes into absolute giant killers. We used to run them all the time at 3500 rpm with cermet inserts, roughing and finishing pinion gears out of alloy steel. I estimate their chip production while I owned them to have been more than six tons each, and most of that blue.
As time went on, we acquired more and larger machines, and floor space was at a premium (by 1993 the rent was $2,600 per month for only 3,600 square feet). The Wades had to go to make room for CNC turning centers. I had drawn plans to fabricate steel bases for the Wades, with deep rear-sloping pans for chip disposal, and to replace the flat-belt pulleys with a single toothed-belt pulley, the flat belt arrangement having been at its torque limit for years, even considering its excellent wraparound contact. However, time budgeting won out and I was never able to transform them for the special-purpose use (finish turning of hardened parts) for which they would have been superbly suited. Instead, I sold them to a gentleman who wanted to reincarnate them a second time to original condition (refinishing the oak benches, etc). The machines having been positively coveted for a long time by every hobbyist who ever visited the shop, I was able to sell them for several thousand bucks. Not bad, considering they had earned well over a million which, in 1993, was real money.
A few years ago we converted a Hardinge chucker to the single-purpose hard-turning function. As nice a tool as it is, the Wades would have been better from an ergonomic standpoint. Sometimes I wish I still had them, but then I still wouldn't have the time. Such is life. I thank you for indulging my reminiscences, and for the wonderful service you offer by way of collecting information about the old machines. I had some broadly similar experiences restoring other machines, and should that be of any use to anyone I would be glad to share them.
If you'd like to see what the Wades helped start, visit
www.woodwardsteering.com.

Warm regards,
Tony Woodward
CEO