I'm glad you decided to give Matt a try. Matt has always been so helpful & nice from the very first time I talked to him & even till now. He may be hard to catch sometimes but he is only one man. Sure you might always get to talk to someone at Grizzly but they may not always be as knowledgeable of helpful as Matt may be & not often the same person twice. I like the one on one experience with Matt & is why I keep going back to him.
I'm also a very happy owner of a PM1236 & have no major issues with mine. As the others have mentioned, it comes with a BXA which normally holds up to 5/8" tools. The BXA size was one of the important factors to me when buying this lathe. There is such a wider range of available tools for BXA over AXA. I hated that certain tools that I wanted or needed were not available in the AXA (1/2") size when I had one. But I use 95% indexable. And in 3/4" shank there's even more different tools that are available. Some mill down the shanks to 5/8" so they can run those tools. I'm not a big fan of milling down shanks (after all there's a reason why the manufacturer didn't make the tool in a smaller shank right?) although I do have a couple here & there but that's because they were cheap on ebay.
I have a Dorian SQCTP on mine, I love it so much I won't use anything else now. Aloris & Dorian make oversized holders that will hold 3/4" shanks but that doesn't always mean you'll be able to use them due to cutter height. Dorian actually makes oversized holders that will fit 1" shanks but again, that doesn't mean you will always be able to use 1" shank tools. I personally don't see a need to run any tooling larger than 5/8" in this size lathe.
Although I have a nice USA made TP, my holders are Chinese & I only have a handful of Dorian holders. Here's my oversized Dorian holder that accepts 1" shanks. That's a 3/4" shank in it.
The bigger size is also more rigid & you can still use 3/8" & 1/2" shanks with the BXA too. I can bury half the insert when cutting aluminum, it's actually quite scary for me. I'm not used to doing that & I don't normally, was just testing the lathe's limits. Don't think I have found the lathes limits yet, I'm too scared. Nothing wrong with the BXA set that comes with the lathe. I would say if you are in the premature stage of buying tools stick with the BXA. And again if you already have a bunch of smaller tooling, no need to replace them, just use them.
Speaking of rigidity in the TP (aside from the machine), fully form knurling SS & Ti can produce forces that are far to great for the TP to handle no matter how tight I crank down on the nut. Sometimes I have to pin the TP in place when I fully form Ti. A very nice feature with the Dorian.
Knurled Ti 6Al4V
The larger TP will also allow you to use bigger tooling when needed like this 1" boring bar. And those Dorian holders are not even the largest ones available.
I never thought I would ever be doing anything that I am doing now or would need any of the larger tooling that I have but it's nice to have the ability to do so when the situation arises. Without that heavy duty scissor knurl that I posted above, I doubt I would be able to get the results that I have.
Much of the larger tooling tooling can be found for much better deals than the smaller stuff on ebay. There's only a few tools that I have where I actually pay full price ($10+) for each insert. That K1-44 Eagle Rock scissor knurl costs $380 new & I scored it barely used for $80. That 1" Kennametal costs $450 new & I scored it new for just over $100. Who knows how expensive that 5/8" solid carbide boring is new but I scored it for $75. I feel like I'm robbing the sellers when I find deals like that but there's always deals like that on ebay.
If you choose to go indexable, you can do a search on ebay like "50, 100, 200 inserts". Find an insert geometry that you like, then you might score big like $1.50 per insert (as opposed to $15 per insert). Then search for the appropiate holder which you might find a 1" or 3/4" shank for $25, mill it down to fit the 5/8" holder & you set on that for the next 10 years or so.
