We construct some series of polyhedral schemata which represent orientable closed connected 3-manifolds. We show that these manifolds have spines corresponding to certain balanced presentations of their fundamental groups. Then we study some covering properties of such manifolds and prove that many of them are cyclic branched coverings of lens spaces. Our theorems contain a number of published results from various sources as particular cases.
AMS 2000 Mathematics subject classification: Primary 57M12; 57M50; 57M60
