Re: By no means is this meant to demean anyone with inexpensive machines, just a viable alternative.
That is a wonderful long term strategy but assuming the lathe was the first, then you have been at it over 50 years.
Just starting out from scratch, you have to get to a position of being able to do basic work unless you just want to wait and make nothing until the right deal comes along to purchase first class tools. I bought a $15 dial caliper, a $30 DTI, and a $15 mic, and a $5 automatic center punch to start with, mostly from Harbor Freight. I used them and was happy.
Over the last month, I came up with a nice Brown and Sharpe DTI that just needed a new stylus, a practically new carbide jaw Mitutoyo dial caliper that some idiot over extended it and lost the gib strip out of, a decent .0001 micrometer that someone unscrewed the ratchet thimble and lost the screw, and a nice Starrett automatic center punch that was put together wrong. All for free from a pile of stuff being sent to the trash. I ordered a new stylus for the DTI, made a new gib from brass shim stock for the caliper, put the center punch together right, and fixed the micrometer with a torx screw from an old hard drive and turned a SS washer. Nearly $600 dollars worth of tools for nothing. I fixed several other items and gave them away. Some other items like the wheelchair drive gear motor will just wait for a project, mine or someone elses.
Do I regret buying the cheap tools? Not in the least. I still have them. They work fine. Taken care of, they will probably last the rest of my life. I will probably take them and have them as spares in my desk at work. They make great loaners too.
If you are on a budget, I think you should start with what you can and then over time you can acquire or make the rest. The deals do come, but not overnight. You have to start somewhere.
Congratulations on the great mensuration score! Careful though, the good ones might turn you into a snob.
)
Good guess David, yes I started a long time ago but like you say,
you have start somewhere and I'm glad that I started young. It gave me the time to do it right.
I too buy things at Harbor Freight, they have some great values but their machine tools don't fall into that category. But they
can syphon off money that could have been much better applied to a great machine at a great value and well worth the search.
I might have a different viewpoint if my first job hadn't been in a small but first class machine shop, starting at 16, in 1955, after school and weekends. There I was introduced to Kearney and Treker, Cincinatti, Monarch, Bridgeport, (3 new J models, which had only been introduced 2 years earlier in '53) and other top, job shop machines. It spoiled me. That's not snobbery, that's from experiencing truly great machines and then later, the few times that I had to use a lesser machine, it was so disappointing. I knew I'd never bring one home.
Early on I got that 12" lathe, made a milling attachment for it and before too long, I got a great deal on a small but truly industrial class vertical mill, a Benchmaster. Then I was pretty well covered and free to work my strategy. It worked so well that I'm sharing it here, before the last of our remarkable machine legacy disappears off-shore forever.
Bob
Below the Benchmaster that I outgrew many years ago and sold a just few years ago to another old guy that's delighted to have it.