Denford Software & Machines

Drawing offices with hundreds of people

I've got a 280 VS exactly as shown in the brochure shown here, along with a poor photocopy of the brochure

Any chance of a scan (at reasonably high resolution) and putting it in the downloads section?

Also, is there a way of dating these machines from the serial number?

Cheers,

Andy

Theres no way I'll get the time to scan it in - just takes too long I'm afraid.
I normally set the camera up on a tripod and take Macro snapshots - they have been good enough to read electrical dwgs in the past.

About the serial numbers, I think there may be an old book somewhere with lots of drawing refs in it - possibly serial numbers as well

I'll see what I can do...

Many moons ago I bought some manuals for our Triac and Orac (must have been about 4 years ago) I spoke to a very nice man at Denford. He worked out the machines from the serial, from memory the last two digits (this may be wrong) was the year it was ordered. May be the same for your machine?????

davidimurray wrote: He worked out the machines from the serial, from memory the last two digits (this may be wrong) was the year it was ordered. May be the same for your machine?????

Not sure that is true for the manual machines - mine is s/no 27390, and I estimate it to be mid-80's.
I have seen another 280 with the manual vari-speed drive, and that was s/no 25832.

Cheers,

Andy

Hmmm - probably not the same then

I presume you have seen this website?

http://www.lathes.co.uk/viceroy/index.html

Cheers

Dave

Dave - yes, I have helped Tony Griffiths with some of the content regarding Viceroys on his site, based on experience with my machine.

Denford Admin wrote:
About the serial numbers, I think there may be an old book somewhere with lots of drawing refs in it - possibly serial numbers as well

I'll see what I can do...

Did this book ever show up?
It could be very useful to us 280 owners!

Andy

Hi - yes I looked at the book and it seems to be just a "sketch" drawing reference book - unless the serial numbers of the machines contained the sk number within it ????

No these are not 'sketches' - this is THE drawing number register!

From what I can read in the photo, the same number series was used for all purposes - transit cases for exhibitions, illustrations for manuals, inspection certificate templates, as well as machine parts.

All drawings that I have seen for the 280 series machines have had a 'SK' prefix - whether mechanical or electrical.
One drawing I have is for the assembly of the manual 'synchro' speed control device, and all components shown have SK... part numbers.

Do any drawings from this era exist, or are they all lost / sold or destroyed?

Yes - there are still huge wooden drawers with huge drawings in them.


As we are moving premises in the near future, I would imagine all these will get burned


If anyone fancies coming to archive them somehow, then your welcome !

If you don't mind them being in France, I can find room in the barns somewhere

So, where are Denford moving to?
Andrew.

Not far - the current plan is to develop on our land next to the current buildings.

So, it's not looking like it will happen in the very near future - suppose it depends on the builders / architects

Ah, an opportunity to cover over some of the potholes in the car park!

Strangely enough, someone has just filled in some of the holes - you only need a 4x4 to use it now

You wouldn't seriously burn them would you? I am sure there are several good alternatives - even the County Record Office might give them a home.

If it's possible to separate them out then I'd take the Viceroy TDS3 material, digitise them and produce a reference manual. Just picked one up on eBay and keen to get whatever material on it that I can.

No - I'm sure we won't be burning them.

However, after speaking to management - it seems pretty complicated what to do with them - it is after all, a lot of man years of design and development of a good machine tool name

I'll keep you posted