Little Dave, if I may, I have a 9x20 and while no expert I've been using it and fixing it for a while. You being around machine tools before you might be used to more heavy duty lathes and the 9x20 isn't. There are a lot of shortcomings and just weirdness like if you look at the cross dial it says each mark is .002. So if you take a .050 cut by the dial you are really taking a .100 cut. A .050" is more than I could take without a lot of chatter and mayhem until i did some work on the cross slide and align the head to the ways. The other weirdness is you have to do some out of the box tinkering to really get it to do a fine cut. If you are using it the way it comes even on the lowest setting of the quick change box it's still too fast to do a real fine cut. I also had to replace the halfnut on mine as it was worn from not being adjusted correctly. That took some modification to get it to fully engage properly.