what area did you look? I'm in NJ. I would like the machine to be able to cut anything from Aluminum to steel and brass
This will not be an issue for any decent machine, even the mini machines can cut steel. The difference is how quickly, the bigger more powerful machines can obviously take bigger bites, than small ones but the small ones can do it with patience.
Thanks , I have been checking craigs list today and nothing in NJ
You can save money buying used, but it takes patience and for somebody new it can be hard to tell the difference between an old but still very serviceable machine and a very pretty piece of junk with a fresh paint job.
Benefits to buying new are you can get it now (or at least order now, sometimes you have to wait for out of stock items), you have someone to go back to if you get a lemon, and parts / tooling should be readily available. Buying used you can often get a lot more machine for the price, and some of the older machines still have good parts support, others very little.
Just going by my experience I'm glad I started with a new machine because all the problems were easily traced back to the idiot operator, not wear or damage caused by prior owners. The things I'm now doing with the new (used) lathe to get it into the shop and ready to use I would have been very uncomfortable doing 2 or 3 years ago when I started out.
Also be prepared that buying the machines is just the start, you will spend a lot of money on additional tooling / time making new tooling. The second part is something I did not expect. Once you have a lathe and a mill you can make a lot of the tooling yourself if you are so inclined. I think some people spend more time making stuff for their machines than just making stuff.
Wow I looked up the model you started out with and Man they were small. I can see how you can make models with it. A guy at work made a truck for his kid. It was about 12 inches long and about 4 inches wide and It turned out beautiful. I was really impressed with his workmanship.
Any way The shop I’m making is exactly 14’x14’x10’ on the 1st floor, it should be enough to handle a 12x36 and a 9x39 mill. Its not so much the room. Like I said the shop will have 2 floors so a lot of my Electrical tools can go up there. And machinery on the first floor. It’s more the money. As you may have heard it’s very expensive to live in Jersey, Taxes are a killer here especially since I’m not making the money I use to.
That being said I thought the Smithy 13x40 I Max would have been a good fit for me plus it came with a lot of tooling but as I stated I also want to do some gunsmithing as well so I want a good machine for boaring and so on. Not sure a 3 in 1 will give me that much persision. Which why I’m reaching out to the forum for advice.
One thing I don’t like about the 3 in 1 is the small spindle boar, it only has 1” while the Grizzly has a 1.57 “ on their 12x36 and 2” on their 14x40. I’m a firm believer in do once and do it right, and I just can’t make up my mind between a 3 in1 or a stand alone or even which company to buy from Smithy or Grizzly. These are my dilemmas.
Mini-lathes often get dismissed as toys, but there are some pretty amazing things being done with very small lathes. There is a guy on a Sherline Facebook group that recently posted some of his parts, he almost exclusively makes detailed parts smaller than 5mm.
There are several posters here who do gunsmithing here, I'd get their opinions on good machines for that, but that looks like a more appropriate combination of machine sizes in general to me. The small spindle bore on the Smithy is something I also noticed, it is quite small compared to other lathes of that size. I assume gunsmithing would make much more use of a larger spindle bore than a larger swing.
There are a lot of very helpful people here on the site. I had little formal machining experience (one year of highschool metal shop in the 1980s) but between youtube, the posters here and practice I've learned a lot in just a couple of years. Still have a lot to learn, but my scrap to useful parts ratio has greatly improved.
