Hey y'all,
apologies if this has all been hashed out here before, but I'm looking to buy my first lathe. The only experience I have is a high school class, which is now well behind me. I have a little Taig CNC machine, which has whet my appetite for metalworking for realz .
I've been reading up on what's what, and the general advice seems to be to buy the biggest lathe you can afford. I think the biggest lathe I can afford is going to come down to space. I'm pretty sure I can fit a 12x36, which also seems to be a reasonable size for getting a fully-featured lathe (e.g. cross power feed, reverse feed, quick-change gearbox, etc).
This is for general messing around, I don't really have any concrete projects lined up, as is - apart from e.g. building a touch probe for the mill.
I'm in Montreal Canada, and I've looked around a little bit for local dealers or used machines, not much I've found so far. Do you all know of options here?
I'm currently looking at the Grizzly G4003G vs. the Precision Matthews PM1236. They're fairly similarly priced and tooled, but what I like about each over the other is as follows.
Grizzly G4003G:
Siggi
apologies if this has all been hashed out here before, but I'm looking to buy my first lathe. The only experience I have is a high school class, which is now well behind me. I have a little Taig CNC machine, which has whet my appetite for metalworking for realz .
I've been reading up on what's what, and the general advice seems to be to buy the biggest lathe you can afford. I think the biggest lathe I can afford is going to come down to space. I'm pretty sure I can fit a 12x36, which also seems to be a reasonable size for getting a fully-featured lathe (e.g. cross power feed, reverse feed, quick-change gearbox, etc).
This is for general messing around, I don't really have any concrete projects lined up, as is - apart from e.g. building a touch probe for the mill.
I'm in Montreal Canada, and I've looked around a little bit for local dealers or used machines, not much I've found so far. Do you all know of options here?
I'm currently looking at the Grizzly G4003G vs. the Precision Matthews PM1236. They're fairly similarly priced and tooled, but what I like about each over the other is as follows.
Grizzly G4003G:
- Has a runout spec on the spindle and claims high-precision bearings.
- Has a D1-5 cam-lock mount vs. D1-4 on the PM.
- Has the 5*8 Norton quick-change gearbox.
- 1.57" spindle bore, vs. 1.5".
- Has a foot brake.
- Has a feed clutch and carriage stop.
- Comes with a cast-iron stand (as an option).
- Max spindle speed is 1850RPM vs. 1400RPM for the Grizzly.
- Comes with a coolant system, though I don't expect that'll be much use to me.
Siggi