Looking at a SF m1018

I went out and looked that Atlas machine yesterday with a friend. The machine looked pretty good at first glance (though he didn't make any effort to clean it up prior to the buyer coming over.... which makes a bad impression for me from the start. He had some rusty mismatched set of tools, the chucks were 4'' and looked tiny, there was some poorly made chuck key, no base plate, no face plate, some old rusty dogs, cheap chinese bits. Worst thing was that he didn't know how to make the lead screw run - so he couldn't show me. I had to assume that it wasn't working. We mounted a piece of 5/8'' mild steel rod in the chuck that I brought with me and tried to run a basic facing operation..... we ended up with a radius around the face of the rod.... we could not get a straight cut with what he had setup... pitiful. We tightened the gibs on the side - they were lose, still, it made no difference in the results.

It's entirely possible someone who knows what they are doing would be able to troubleshoot and make proper adjustments on this thing and probably get it to go, but I was dismayed with what I saw and I walked away.

He pinged me later to tell me he got the lead screw to go, but I told him I need something with more precision than what I saw there. Disappointing.
 
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It's entirely possible someone who knows what they are doing would be able to troubleshoot and make proper adjustments on this thing and probably get it to go, but I was dismayed with what I saw and I walked away.

For what he was asking I'd expect everything to work well and at least include a decent set of basic tooling appropriate to the lathe.

Too bad, the ad looked promising but this is a good example of why many say never to buy a machine without putting your hands on it. It isn't that hard to make a bad machine look good in photos.
 
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