I sold my Jet mini, or at least I will have sold it come Thursday, so, now I need to find a new lathe. I know that the first thing everyone will recommend is a Powermatic or Oneway, but I'm not looking in that class. I really can't/don't want to spend more than $4-500. I'm looking for a full size lathe that will be great for table legs and an occasional bowl/vase/etc. I plan to eventually build or buy a template setup for spindles and want the ability to do things like fluted turnings, so indexing capability would be nice, but I can always build a jig to do the indexing, so that's not really important. I realize that if I ever do decide to get serious into turning, that this lathe won't be my last, but I want to go to a full size lathe so that any fixturing would apply to a different lathe if that time comes, and I don't expect it to as I'm just not that interested in turnings (though I do enjoy looking at the stuff you guys and gals "turn" out.) I also already have 1"x8TPI chuck, so I'd like to find a lathe that will work with that. I've identified a few options:
- A used Jet 1236 or the Harbor Freight clone. The HF is available 10 minutes from work and will likely be on sale for $179 in the near future given HF's history. I've read a lot of recommendations for this lathe and only a few negative comments. The 1236's come up for sale occasionally, but I'd just have to wait and see to find one.
- An old-iron 12x36ish lathe. This would probably be ideal, but I don't want to get into a money pit, so I would need to buy from someone I trust (and deal with shipping) or find one close by. This would probably be the ideal choice, but the trick would be finding something. Plus I'm under the impression that I'd probably end up having to put a VFD on it to get more than a couple speeds which adds to the cost.
- Grizzly G0462. I'd consider this a higher end lathe for what I'm looking for and it is fairly new so I didn't find to much on it. I did read some negative comments on the older Grizzly lathes but don't know how much they've changed on their newer ones.
I also found the cast iron bed Delta new for a pretty reasonable price close by, but it is over my price range and I read a lot of complaints about it so I took it off my list.