Does anyone have any experience with these machines? Are they quality machines or should they be avoided.

I'm not looking to perform production work. Just a machine accurate enough to perform quality gun work and home projects.

Thanks,
J.W.

JW,

What you have to realize about Enco, Grizzly, Harbor Freight, J&L and the others is that all the machines are essentially the same, and made in mainland China. You need to consider the machines as works in progress, and expect that you'll have to do a thorough alignment of the machine, as well as perhaps re-machining and repair of some parts. If you put that effort in, then the machines will be capable of good work.

The two things you should be concerned with is, what type of service does the company you buy the machine from provide, and get a machine that is big enough and rigid enough to do good work. The 12X36 lathes are a minimum, but a 13 or 14 by 40 would be better.

Enco has been notorius for extremely poor and slow service, as well as Harbor Freight.

I've found Grizzly to have very good service, and would recomend them as a supplier. All the machines are about the same, so get one from someone who will provide support, as there is a good chance you'll need some.

Which other ones would you recommend? I am unfortunately not going to be buying one soon, but have a friend who is looking to for other purposes and would like to be able to help him out.

Thanks.

Red

The average home hobbyist or gunsmith is not going to spend $60k for a lathe and $3k for each chuck etc.

So the same guy is going to have to buy a 30 year old machine or take his chances with import quality.

Either choice will likely be a work in progress. My lathe and mill were originally purchased by aerospace corporations that had government contracts.
Then they went to medium sized companies that had a dozen employees. I got them third hand, and I have had to work on them.

At the same time, I have watched friends get new tools from Enco, Grizzly, Jet, etc. tools and there are three reactions:
1) It is great the way it came
2) It took allot of work to get it to be accurate
3) It is just junk and can't be fixed.

The biggest forum for machine tools is rec.crafts.metalworking, which is a news group, but can be accessed through the web on google by clicking on "groups" at the google home page, and then clicking on "advanced group search".
I will run a search on "Enco, mill, quality":
http://www.google.com/groups?as_ q=enco%20mill%20quality&safe=images&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&as_ugroup=rec.crafts.metalworking&lr=&as_scoring=d&hl=en

Here is just the news group:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=rec.crafts.metalworking

[ 09-13-2003, 02:57: Message edited by: Clark ]

From what I've seen and from my own experience, Jet is probably the best of the lot! They tend to be accurate Mills and Lathes, but have real quality problems. For the price though, they work pretty darn well.-Rob

Don't buy a Smithy, everytime I work on it, I wish I would have bought something else.

Anyone want to buy a CB1239XL?

I have a friend that has 2 Harbour frieght lathes and likes them.

One very important consideration is the lowest speed that can be set.
If you are threading a barrel shank it becomes really tricky to thread
10/inch for 1 inch @ 100 rpm. A real fast finger exercise.
A large heavy lathe is nice, but you have to get it off of the truck and
installed without wrecking it and/or yourself.
Good luck!

Circa 1984 I bought an Enco 8 X 18 lathe to see if I could do barrel work on it. Around $1000. About $2000 less than the EMCOs from Austria.

No quick Change and no data for using the change gears to cut common 12 and 16 tpi. Lowest speed was 140 rpm.

I quickly noticed that centers were unecessarily long. Had them reground, increasing length BTC to 21". Also found that on the lowest speed the belt was on a pulley that was clutched effectively reducing speed to 70 rpm under load.

After chambering and profiling half dozen sporter weight barrels I placed a large add in Shotgun News for these modified lathes. Delivered some 200 of these light lathes to satisfied customers all over the US.

Much has changed over 20 years. Grizzley, for example, offers an 11 X 36 version of this lathe. With QC and extremely good support. The Tiawan/RedChinese do accurate work once you get them setup.

Check out http://www.grizzly.com/index.cfm?

Get the heaviest lathe your budget will allow and start having fun.

Wally