The lathe broke the first time in less than 20 minutes or running. I was just running the carriage back and forth to work in the oil, and give it some run in time. I had not even put the tool post on it yet. One of the drive gears in the gear box failed, and the whole things quit working. DroPros stood right up and contacted Sieg, who sent me a replacement gear, total downtime was about 10 days. I was pretty impressed.
The head stock sits on the v-ways. It is possible I can loosen and knock it around, but it might be a can of worms. I do not want to start aligning it until I feel I have the time to remove the head and check for debris. Scraping it into alignment will not be a difficult job since all I would need to do is make space for adjustment (assuming the headstock has no nod to it). I am just really bothered about the whole thing because a convex cutting lathe is considered a door stop by any one in the industry. Squaring up the carriage is a whole different matter though, I do not feel confident to tackle that with out some practice on something else, I have other things to do beside practice scraping. I purchased a new machine just so I would not have to rebuild an old machine.
I would not dump on DroPros quite so quickly. They have a reputation for customer service for a reason. They are just not in the tool business, and this whole thing is outside their area of expertise. They do seem to have the best prices for DRO's unless you buy direct from China, and they offer a ton of support. I knew when I got into the lathe that there was potential for problems because they are the only USA dealer of this tool. Buying from them was a mistake on my part because I was aware of where problems might exist. This does not relieve them of obligation to me though, even if they have stopped offering the machine (I was told they had 0 problems with the SC8 - I guess my broken gear was not really a problem), I expect them to help me work out the issues.
