well, as all of these things seem to, a friend handed me a tailstock and banjo/tool rest from small old cheezy lathe and said "I don't want these any more, please sell them". And of course he had no idea what they fit - so I tried the usual - part numbers - no match, logo - never seen it before - then I remembered the OWWM.com site with the old manuals and catalogs and stuff. The logo was a diamond with a big H in the middle and some squiggles around it that might have been other letters, so I figure - let's look at companies that have an H in a prominent position in their name - so I start from the top, looking at the text and downloading catalogs that seem promising - and after only 4 or 5 tries, I found
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which brings up the 1935 catalog for Herberts Machinery Co. - Los Angeles, CA, and amazingly enough right there as the first wood lathe in the catalog (on pg 12 of the PDF) is a lathe with the exact cheap castings as what I had - how cool is that - the text explains the advantages of a 5/8 inch spindle (!!!), and touts the cast aluminum tailstock as being "a one-piece heavy casting, carefully and accurately made" - it's a real piece of art - it's the only tailstock I've seen where the dead center is just a point turned onto a screw, which itself forms the tailstock quill. Anyway, after almost killing myself patting myself on the back, I listed the item in one of the usual get rich venues and thought I'd come here and brag about the research approach - and maybe encourage someone else with some mystery stuff to try the same method to figure out what they have - it worked for me.
here's the link to it -
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