Help choosing a lathe

Slayer_MN1 said:
Excellent response! Just an FYI I was in no way knocking PM as a company, just rebutting information that I've witnessed. I seriously considered getting a PM 1236, and would have had I not gotten a very good price on the G0709. I think the bigger lathe will suit my needs a little better, but I doubt I would've been lacking anything with the 1236.

I'm glad to see you're here to help and keep people up to date on the precision Matthews lineup.


Steve
Click to expand...

Thanks... BTW: As much as possible, I make technical contributions in the way of project demonstrations and assistance with any type of machinery that I'm familiar with. As many know, I established a formal shop business early in the year that caters mainly to the yacht/marina industry -and it's starting to gain momentum. I'm on-site early in the mornings until 3-4 PM then, return here and to my shop. Every day at the marina pulls-in 1-2 shop jobs and I knock those out in the late evenings. And here's an interesting tidbit... I made a special attachment device for a client who was thrilled with it. It has to be cut on the CNC machine. Turns-out the client was a retired patent attorney and he's filing a patent for me -and this stands the potential of being a very popular item. I'm currently making slight refinements on the item, designing a couple slight variations of it and doing formal strength analysis and MTBF calculations. It's consuming much of my time but, I always take care of business for the machine customers...


Ray
 
Hi, just another happy PM1236 owner. I've had my lathe for a couple of months short of 5 years now (I had to check because I couldn't believe it had been that long).

First, definitely go with the DRO. I have no idea how I survived without it.

Second, I had two little issues with the lathe when I first got it. Neither one could have been caught by QC before hand because they both worked the first couple days. Matt took care of them right away, as in scary fast, no questions asked.

Yes, I had to wait a bit for the lathe. But, from what I've seen that happens with all of these companies at one time or another.

In the mean time I had a serious problem with my mill, a used Jet 8x30. While talking to Matt one Saturday night the mill came up in conversation. I won't go into the details of how he helped me because I wouldn't wish that on him again from anybody and you probably wouldn't believe me anyway. Suffice it to say it was definitely not in his job description.

The lathe itself has run flawlessly. It's way more capable than I am. I would not hesitate to do it all over again, wait time and all. I'm glad Matt has somebody like Ray now to help him out, he deserves it.

Mike
 
Other than Eisen can anyone advise on any other machines that are made in Taiwan that are reasonably priced? Thanks.
 
Well it's been awhile.....lol. Sometimes life takes ya in a different direction. Anyways I thought I would update my thread. I been lurking here and there in the forum for quite a while but have not posted. I ended up buying a used Enco 14X40 lathe. I knew the original owner and he used it very sparingly in his shop. He pretty much gave it to a friend of mine for little or nothing. It sat in his shop for about 3 years and was never hooked up. His son ended up with it but it still sat in the same place. He sold it to me for 1700 bucks. It's 3 phase but he threw in a RFC to run it. It came with some tooling and quick change posts and couple of old chucks. I have it hooked up and running. Seems to work good as I have not used it much. I ended up getting lucky and finding an Enco knee mill about 6 months later. I gave 500 for it as it was not running however once I got it home I quickly figured out why and now it's running off the same RFC and seems to be ok as far as I can tell. Just wanted to update things. Looking forward to learning more.
 
Sounds like you have the beginnings of a very nice shop.

Pictures or it didn't happen ;)

John
 
Use the little picture icon to the left of the video camera (two over from smiley face).

38DF00FC-44C7-483B-ACC4-99CE8944537C.jpeg
 
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