Critique our lathe choice

[asid61]

Originally Posted by MrRoboSteve

Thanks for the input. The option that Cory pointed out is intriguing.

I watched Craigslist for a while and had two issues with it:

1. Not a lot of metalworking lathes at prices we can afford in our area.

2. I know nothing about lathes and therefore can't judge whether something is a good deal, is fixable, etc. We're bootstrapping ourselves from no knowledge.

S

No knowledge could be bad. If any of the students of mentors know a machinist, they could critique a lathe before purchase. If you can't find somebody like that, then maybe new is the way to go.

This one looks pretty good:
http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/da...077388442.html
The person who owns it sounds pretty reasonable, so I'm sure they would let you give it a try to see what kind of cuts and to what accuracy you can make. Looking it up on Google, it sounds like a beast of a machine- several thousand pounds and a 7.5HP motor.
No tooling except a chuck and QCTP, but you can get tooling at that price.

EDIT: Joe's link above is a good guide.