lathes, what's best?

[Dick Linn]

South Bend is good. Hardinge may be even better, and they also now produce and service the Bridgeport mills, if you need parts. Many modern shops still keep a Hardinge Precision Toolroom lathe around (HLV or DV models). Hardinge's been around for over 100 years. Clausing, LeBlond and others are good.

There are lots of good brands, especially the older ones that might be more affordable. See http://www.lathes.co.uk/index.html for more info,. The index page at http://www.lathes.co.uk/page21.html lists about 300 lathe manufacturers!

Browse http://www.machineryvalues.com/ to see what's available and what the price ranges are. emachinetool.com also has listings.

Good luck.

[Greg Needel]

i have used a bunch of types of lathes and most professional lathes are comperable to each other. the thing you need to look at is the price of the accessories and what is available. for example different lathes require different jaws and have different requirements when it comes to collets and so on. you will want one that has easy available parts for replacement and innital purchas. you also want to look to see if there is a taper attachment (making life much easyer), what different tail stock supports they have (drill, point, clamp, etc) all of this stuff is important.

[cmaccoy]

Are you putting anything else in the Machine Shop?

[nobrakes8]

Hardinge Lathes are the best. We use them at Utitec Inc. to machine parts to .0003" tolerences or even tighter by hand (No CNC machine could handel those jobs). Hardenge lathes last a long long long time, and they run very conecentric. In the manufacturing business Hardinge lathes are like the mercedes benz of lathes (best example i have heard from my shop instructor). We also have Harrisions which are very good lathes but as the get older they don't hold up as well. Our Harrision lathes are probably 10-15 yrs old, brand new the tool makers tell me they were very good, now they taper about .002" if we stick a part out of a collet more than 5-6 inches. Depending on what you need to do you may not need to spend the money on a hardinge. IMO stick with the major companies (Bridgeport, DoAll, Hardinge, Harisson and.. i forgot the other company)