There are very few situations where our lathe needs to be run in reverse, yet it has been very easy to start the lathe in reverse, or to accidentally switch without pause from forward to reverse or vice versa.
So I have made a small modification to the lathe that blocks the control lever from switching into reverse. This should eliminate a very common error in using the lathe. But if a user does want or need to run the lathe in reverse, all they need to do is remove a small bolt from the control rod at the far back right of the lathe. (This can be easily done by hand.) The lathe will then operate in its original manner. Anyone doing this should restore the bolt when they are done to re-enable the reverse block.
I’ll post a picture of this later and put up a sign on the lathe reminding users of this.