To buy or not to buy (Atlas 101.28910)

Welp, she followed me home last night. I ended up getting the lathe and a decent band saw for $1200. The lathe didn't have many tools included, apparently they were lost in the transfer from the estate to the seller. It does have a nice looking 6 jaw chuck. The lathe is definitely used but seems to be in great shape, the ways show no visible wear. The previous owner used it to make pool cue parts. I'll snap some pics when I get it in place and cleaned up. I posted the same message in the Grizzly thread. I guess it'd be appropriate to move the conversation over there. I really appreciate the help and warm welcome to the forum.
 
woohoo, congratulations! We need pics! That's a fabulous price for this neck of the woods. How come you didn't get the mill too?
 
Thanks! I would have loved to grab that mill too. At the end of the day, it was just too big for my space. For now I'm going to be forced to find a larger table top machine. The mill he had for sale looked to be in good shape, it'll make someone a nice machine. He said he had 9 people lined up behind me for it. When I get the lathe unloaded and in its home I'll snap a few pics.
 
that's a shame. I would have tried to create more space, but having to share a (narrow) 2 car garage with the wife's car, I know where you're coming from.
 
Got it in place over the weekend, had to move my compressor and run some new air lines. It took some time to get it as level as I could with a nice 24" level. Unfortunately I don't have an engineers level to get it dead nuts on. I was able to play around with it and make some chips. I've got a lot of tooling to order. I did what I could with the one piece of HSS I very crudely ground. It turns aluminum relaly nicely. As This Old Tony says, "aluminum makes everyone look like a Rockstar". I turned down some aluminum rod, at this point its turning a .014 taper, big on the tail end and small on the headstock end. Gotta do some investigating and figure that one out.

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very nice! Set-tru 6 jaw too, that's worth about what you paid for the lathe :) I shouldn't worry about taper right now, most likely that's due to deflection (cutter pushing the work away from it) from the long work stick out and possibly less than ideal cutter.

Purists will string me from a tree for saying this, but a SCLCR cutter and matching CCGT inserts will have you cutting like a pro in no time and for little money.

Looks like you got a fabulous deal, well done.
 
As a general rule of thumb, any time that the work piece length is more than about 3 times the diameter, one should cut a center and use either a dead or better a live center in the tailstock. If there is some practical reason that you cannot do that, make a spring cut every other or every third pass, and finish with two or more spring cuts. That is assuming that you have the tailstock back set correctly adjusted.
 
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