In the 70's? I worked at a shop that purchased a new lathe made in Romania. The Romanian who came out for some warranty repair said they measured turning length distance from a spindle faceplate(not chuck) to tailstock..In a message dated 1/17/2024 8:44:26 PM Pacific Standard Time, mctaglieri@... writes:

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Actually, I did that myself on my own lathe. Might as well get as much capacity as you can on such a small lathe.

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Mike Taglieri?

On Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 8:52 AM chrisser via <chris.kucia=[email protected]> wrote:

An unscrupulous marketing person might grind the centers so they sit less proud in the tapers to generate a more generous distance between...

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On Wednesday, January 17th, 2024 at 8:37 AM, Aaron Woods <awoods550@...> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 17, 2024 at 04:56 AM, Paul Fox wrote:Can someone explain how the length measurement is usually done, and how HF fudges that measurement to make 8 == 10 ?? ?I'm convinced that I don't want one -- just trying to understand.paul

The 7x10" measurement probably came about through incorrect measurement and / or very poor rounding up of the metric conversion and has stuck. It is not just HF, pretty much all of the sellers that market these in inches use that term for the Sieg C2 Model 200. Sieg itself lists these lathes with a swing of 180mm (7.08") and between centers distance of 200mm (ie Model 200). Properly converted 200mm = 7.87".

The between centers distance is the length of a part that can be held on the lathe between centers. You can find some variation on identical lathes based on the centers used. For example the very common 9x20 lathe (aka Grizzly G4000 / Jet BD920) is listed by different vendors as either a 9x19 or a 9x20 lathe. This difference is based on whether they supply the lathe with a live or dead center for the tail stock. A live center is about 1" longer giving lathes that ship with a live center a slightly shorter 19" between centers.

I suspect as the first of the Chinese mini lathes to arrive, the person tasked with measuring and converting to inches, measured the distance between the spindle and tail stock without centers in place giving a number closer to 10". When the Model 300 (300mm aka 11.8") arrived, the person given the task of measuring was more competent and measured correctly with centers in place.