You can shim a gap piece to give you that ability, when they rescrape a bed they infil with mogalice or other material to make the slide etc back to the standard centre height so its quite often done.
I had a spare gap piece from my old l5 that I scrapped because the bed was shot and the headstock had major issues too, and I mentioned that in passing on a mailing list, then suddenly I had 6 messages in my email inbox asking how much to part with it, so there's a lot of lathes out there lacking.
I think I'd rather have a gap piece that needed work or didn't match my lathe perfectly than none at all.
On the flip side of the coin I bought a norton gearbox for the leadscrew of a l5a, I'm going to adapt it onto my l5 when I get time as it involves cutting the leadscrew shafts down to accomodate its extra length its a bit of a job, but I keep seeing the donor lathe popping up with the next owner asking round if anyones got a norton leadscrew box for one. You might wonder why I'm going to the effort for a old school lathe, but a lathe in the shed that I know already the condition of is worth 5x of anything new to me that I would have to sort rigging and transport on...
I had a spare gap piece from my old l5 that I scrapped because the bed was shot and the headstock had major issues too, and I mentioned that in passing on a mailing list, then suddenly I had 6 messages in my email inbox asking how much to part with it, so there's a lot of lathes out there lacking.
I think I'd rather have a gap piece that needed work or didn't match my lathe perfectly than none at all.
On the flip side of the coin I bought a norton gearbox for the leadscrew of a l5a, I'm going to adapt it onto my l5 when I get time as it involves cutting the leadscrew shafts down to accomodate its extra length its a bit of a job, but I keep seeing the donor lathe popping up with the next owner asking round if anyones got a norton leadscrew box for one. You might wonder why I'm going to the effort for a old school lathe, but a lathe in the shed that I know already the condition of is worth 5x of anything new to me that I would have to sort rigging and transport on...
