Ive been looking at getting a lathe for my birthday and my budget is $700 ive looked at mini lathes but they get expensive real quick ive looked at https://littlemachineshop.com/info/minilathe_compare.php to compare models of mini lathes since they have different motors and sizes and such. so i decided to look around and see if i can find a lathe within a few hours on driving and Ive read some about how you want ways that are V’s like a south-bend but its very mixed on if its a good lathe or not. it needs to run on single phase have powerfeed and not be super big Thanks for all the help in advance! what do guys think, is there any other alternatives?
Edit-- i know $700 really isnt a big budget for a lathe but i work part time and dont have alot of money to spend. i also plan to post some cool stuff i plan to make on my future lathe!!
Those old Craftsman tools are pretty stout. Yeah flat ways with an open saddle definitely aren’t gonna get you super high precision or good runout but it’ll sure beat any of the Chinese made mini lathes you find at harbor freight etc. if you just want to turn low-speed shafts and decorative things, it’ll work fine.
From experience the Chinese mini lathes can get you runout of about 0.005" if you know what you’re doing in a soft material. That Craftsman can probably hit 0.002 or 0.003 in aluminum. Again, probably okay for shafts not spinning more than a couple hundred rpm, and doing mild steel will be ungodly slow. but better than whittling by hand!
It doesn’t look like that Craftsman has an acme thread on the cross feed for threading tho. Maybe I’m blind or the jpeg is much too strong. But that’s a pretty big negative.
Why would it take forever to turn mild steel? Is the motor slow/not very good? I looked a UNIMAT lathes as well, and I did like them, but the tooling is very small, and the motors can only be run for 8 minutes if ran hard until you have to let it cool down, the motors were also very low powered. Which is why I decided i wouldn’t really like the Unimat that much.
Low motor power and very low machine rigidity. If you try to take a heavy cut in a hard material eith too weak of a machine you’ll flex it too much, get chatter as the machine body turns into a spring, and potentially stall the motor.
So the thing I would like to know is would the Taiwan mini LATHES be able to do mild steel any better? I’m not looking for a lathe that can cut alconel or tungsten, just mild steel aluminum and brass. Especially for $550 I’ve seen people put 3/4 to 1 horsepower motors into these LATHES and be fine. Which as you said doesn’t fix the ridgitiy but I don’t know if im going to find a better alternative for less than $700 Also thanks for being so insiteful.
You’re welcome!
The import lathes with V-ways might be a little better, but still not great.
Don’t get me wrong, they’ll both be fully capable of cutting steel. You just can’t take big deep cuts or feed it really fast, it’ll be slow and steady with a nice sharp bit.
I’ve found a lot better lathe for less, I would post about it but im afraid someone would snipe my deal ;D So by next week be expecting some updates, and the lathe is made in the USA so Its gonna be really good. And it does have V ways stay tuned
Scratch that somebody bought it by the time I was asking If it was available, it was a southbend 9B its was awesome for 350$ well I’m depressed now :/