The Beast of Syracuse
I first met Millicent in the Fall of 2016, when she was already nearly one hundred years old.
The years had not been kind to her; most likely brought into the world to help vanquish the Kaiser, she had labored for decades making parts, doing thousands of hours of threading. When she was put out to pasture by the original purchasers, she was passed from one indifferent owner to another, doing any number of odd jobs while her health declined, she lost some teeth, and stiffness, fatigue, and general malaise crept over her. Purchased at last by a caring owner and retrieved from the basement in Chicago where she had languished for many years, she was treated for her worst health problems and given a new job, making the occasional run of parts. However, her age and general condition proved unequal to the task, and she was once again relegated to the sidelines, this time at least given shelter in a shipping container until I was able to purchase her freedom for a mere three hundred dollars. After much work and TLC, she has regained most of her health and not a little of her dignity, her scabby hide now returned to a glossy coat, and the past five years working with her have undone a lifetime of neglect. This comeback is heartwarming but not unheard of. People rescue dogs, cats, horses, and other animals all the time. Things are a bit different when it comes to old Millie, though.
For, you see, Millicent is a metal lathe.
I’ve had a bug in my ear for ages about finding a Porter-Cable lathe. After all, lathes and milling attachments are really where the company made its first foray into the world of tools, and if a body has a hankering to make an all- Porter-Cable workshop dedicated to restoring that company’s products, a P.C.-made metal lathe ( or, in company parlance, an engine lathe) is de rigueur. While there are three basic flavors of Porter-Cable lathe, two of them, the Rapid Production and the later Carbo-Lathe, are purely production lathes, highly specialized for making hundreds of a given part a day; they don’t even have provision for threading and as a result, don’t lend themselves to making onesies-twosies parts. But the third machine, a far more versatile design, was right up my alley. What I need, I said to myself, Is a Mulliner Enlund.
Established in Cincinnati, Ohio in late 1915, Mulliner Enlund was a very small concern, so small that they only had two products, a 12” and a 14” lathe. Moving a few years later to Syracuse, NY, they were purchased by Porter-Cable in May of 1919, and the entire outfit down to the cleaning lady was brought into the fold, joining the family at the Salina Street plant.
The Mulliner-Enlund was a fairly forward-thinking but otherwise conventional engine lathe that was offered in a number of differing bed lengths, the longest being a 6’. There are several well-made features that will immediately seem familiar to anyone who has run a Hendey lathe of that period, especially the quick change gearbox and the threading dial. There’s a good reason for this- Mulliner-Enlund used the patented designs of a fellow named Wendell Norton, who worked for Hendey ( presumably, they made their versions under license, though the gearbox is so similar it may actually be the same casting). The Mulliner distinguished itself by the then-uncommon headstock design, which eschewed the older style of stirrup-shaped casting for one that extended up to the centerline of the spindle, making for a far more rigid headstock and obviating the need for a tierod such as the one used on the Hendey “conehead” system. The lathe was robust, accurate, and easy to operate, and the addition of a separate feed rod for threading proved a popular feature. Porter-Cable changed nothing but the name on the lathe, leaving well enough alone, and sales continued on into the early ‘20s when president Walter Ridings made the decision to pivot toward woodworking equipment.
Never common, these lathes were only offered for a total of ten years altogether, used solely in industry, and the vast majority of them were used until they were worn out, then promptly turned into bathtubs and razorblades via the local scrapyard. I had my work cut out for me to find an example for my shop, or so I thought.
Turns out, I had to post a couple of want ads.
OWWM came through for me once again; I regularly reposted my WTB ad on BOYD, the site’s forum for machine sales ( Bring Out Your Dead, if you’re wondering, and yes, Monty Python is implicit in that joke). After about a year I received a message from Dan, a member I had met in the past. It seems he had just what I was looking for, even if he was incredulous at first as to why anyone would one such a specific, obscure brand of machine.
What can I say, I’m a romantic.
He was kind enough to not only disinter the old girl from her crypt behind his machine shop but to then load the lathe on a trailer and cart it from Indiana to Chrystal Lake, Illinois, where Millicent was dismantled and loaded into two full-sized trucks for the trip to Ohio. I had assumed that the Mulliner was about the same weight as a similarly sized South Bend or Sheldon lathe, a fallacy that everyone involved was quickly disabused of when the chip pan, legs, and bed alone were enough to bottom out the suspension of an F-150.
Making her way to me in a number of pieces, Millicent looked like hell. The entire machine had a coat or five of the scabrous gray/green paint that is issued to every factory flunky along with the tar brush used to apply it. Several of the gearbox shifter gate fingers were snapped off, there was a feed gear that was entirely missing, the chuck was worn out… Millicent was very nearly a centenarian, and every year had taken its toll.
That said, for all her mileage she still had it where it counted, and it became clear that the old lathe could very likely turn out a satisfactory part in the hands of an understanding operator, so cleanup began. The wire wheeling was the easiest part, as the paint failure was almost complete, and the original satin black livery was no hardship to apply. Likewise, the repairs to the gearbox were the work of an afternoon, pinning pieces of steel to the casting and welding them in place. Even the missing gear was an easy repair- in fact, the old girl was able to do the machining on her own gears ( metal lathe, heal thyself! ). The biggest challenge, when all was said and done, was in moving her into her berth.
I had said that the Mulliner-Enlund was quite a bit heavier than most of the lathes I was familiar with, and she had gained a bit of weight over the years. At some point in the late ‘30s or early ‘40s, some long-ago owner had removed her from the lineshaft that machines of her era were shackled to by fitting the overhead drive from a South Bend 15” lathe, freeing up the lathe to be moved around but adding several hundred pounds of cast iron and copper ( the motor mounts to the top of the whole affair), and if my math is right, Millicent weighs in at about 2,700lbs without swarf in the chip pan. I don’t always name machines, but I knew her name was Millicent the second I laid eyes on her. However, as TS Eliot once said about cats, metal lathes need at least three names, and by the time the old girl came to rest in her new home, she was given the sobriquet The Beast of Syracuse. The largest swing and longest bed available, she’s the biggest machine to ever wear the Porter-Cable name, even if our particular example is about six or eight months too old to undergo the name change.
The headstock bearings are conical bronze, and it was simple enough to adjust them to take up play. I swapped out the Delco motor that was mounted in the ‘40s for a General Electric Polyphase built in the very early ‘20s, mounted an Adjustco work light, and retrofitted a South Bend micrometer stop with a dial indicator for operations like threading to a shoulder. The D.E. Whiton chuck that had graced the spindle lo, these many years was retired in exchange for an early Cushman three-jaw, and there is also a Skinner four-jaw on hand. I’ve kept the tooling to WW2 and earlier for the sake of verisimilitude ( and because I’m quite familiar with sharpening HSS tooling), even going so far as to source period Jacobs chucks for the tailstock.
I had hoped to get my hands on an example of this lathe that could eke out an acceptable part without too much frustration. What I got is a machine capable of peeling a piece of high carbon steel like an orange to a level of accuracy that’s better than any other lathe I’ve owned ( even the lovely Sheldon 10” that I sold to bail Millicent out of lathe jail). The Mulliner Enlund is an impressive machine, more precise than I am and quite adept at fabricating parts for my various restorations; at the moment, the old girl is making a new feed pawl for my metal shaper, and boy, does she do good work.
Millicent has led a tumultuous life. When this lathe was made, doughboys were fighting at the Marne in France, women couldn’t vote yet, and the very idea of having such a mammoth metal lathe in a home shop for making the occasional widget was laughable. How many jobs has the old girl done, thousands? Tens of thousands? In the past five years, this lathe has had a hand in hundreds of repairs, doing everything from machining a new lower spindle for a B-1 stationary belt sander to turning piano wire into guard springs for Speedmatic saws. She’s proven to be a maid-of-all-work here in the shop, and while the two milling machines that keep company with her do a lot to help out, Millicent is the reigning queen of the toolroom.
I like to joke that I don’t know much about machining, but I know a lot of oldtimers that do, and I’m looking forward to learning all the tricks ( Millicent would use the term “shop kinks” if she could talk, but I wouldn’t be able to take her seriously. Luckily, she’s not much for chatter. That's a lathe joke) that this heavyset old lady can teach.
