My partner's mother is 83. Two years ago she bought a Ford Ka+. It was 3 years old, one previous owner. Quite tidy.
It's absolutely
nothing like buying a used car.
It's several orders of magnitude more complex. Pretty much everyone can, or knows someone who can assess a secondhand car.
Also these days there are standards a car has to meet before one can get the insurance to be able to drive it on the road.
People who have absolutely zero background in machining (and in the UK, this may be more common than in the States) are like a person who knows about the concept of a car and its high level functionality and maybe has seen pictures of cars but has never touched one, let alone driven one.
Now, depending on their budget, space and location, they may have access to a company like PM (or in the UK, to a lesser extent, Warco) and have access to functionally acceptable/decent quality machine tools with the backup/support and advice needed to buy with confidence.
If not, there
is the secondhand market and old iron but that's a bloody intimidating prospect for people lacking the necessary experience.
That's why a lot of people buy mini-lathes; it's a cheap way in (or looks like it, anyway) where they assume they'll get something workable out of the box. They find out truth soon enough (and if they stick with it and see it as a project of fettling and improvement, they end up with very mixed feelings
).
The advice to buy old iron
can be good advice, if it's given in the right context and with the necessary caveats.
Let's face it, if one had a choice between a suitably sized Colchester, Harrison, Boxford (or US equivalent) with QCGB say,
in mint condition on the one hand, and a PM 10x30 on the other, most would feel that the old iron would be the better buy.
However, that's going to be an uncommon choice. The reality is that the unknowns of buying older used machine tools can also make a lot of people feel helpless and incapable and possibly end up with them missing out on a fantastic education and discovering skills that they never imagined they had.
There one significant reason for the existence of this forum and that's the experience of getting advice on starting out on other forums.
Eh, within the bounds of the rules of this forum, it's our own business what advice we give to beginners, but perhaps we might take their constraints seriously and weigh our words carefully when giving advice to people.
