How to Buy a Lathe

If you're in the market for a wood lathe, I am here to help you. Today, I'm gonna give you information about lathes and different price points that offer different features, different capacities. This is gonna be great information to help you pick the right machine for your shop. Now, let me start over here with a representative of what's called a bench top blade. These machines are very versatile. Their development has come a long way in recent years. Let me show you what you've got here. With these machines, we wanna be concerned with the swing and with the spindle capacity. So here with these bench top lathes, the good news is these are the least expensive machines that we're gonna talk about. For about the price of a good portable power tool, you could get one of these lathes in your shop. In swing capacity, generally, we're talking about 10 or 12 inches. In spindle capacity, maybe 12 or 15 inches. The motors on these machines hover right around a half a horsepower or so. So in the motor range, it's gonna be the smallest motor of what we're about to talk about. And in the capacity range, smallest capacities. Now that's not necessarily bad, it's plenty of capacity to do halfway decent sized bowls, some pretty good spindles, especially in the category of pen turning and that kind of work. Now, the really cool thing with these machines is that you can get extensions for the end of them so I can build them out this way. If you wanna do longer spindles like table legs or baseball bats, we can add onto the end and get that extra capacity. We can't change the swing capacity on these. So whatever they come with, that's what you're gonna live with. Now, it's common on lathes when we talk about speed control that they have a system of step polis. Now, what's gonna happen when you use this machine is that you're gonna get started with your turning at a given speed. When you're ready to do a speed change, shut the machine off, change the belt to another step that makes your speed change. Close the cover, you go back to work. So every time you do a speed change, you're gonna stop the machine, unplug it cause you're opening the hood, do your speed change, close it back up, plug it back in, go back to work. Now, comparatively, you're gonna see some changes as we work our way up the line here. So to cut this off a couple of things. Remember we've got maybe a 10 or 12 inch bowl capacity, 12 to 15 inch spindle capacity, horsepower, about a half horsepower on the motor. What's really nice about these is at the end of the day, I can pick this machine up, put it away. I know a lot of turners who travel in RVs, they take these machines with them. They get where they're going, they put it on a picnic bench. They do their turning, tuck it back in the RV at the end. So the portability, the small footprint, that's a great benefit of these mini-lathes. Let's at one that's one size bigger. Now the price tag goes up a little bit here, but we get all sorts of cool stuff with this one. The capacity out of the box is quite a bit greater between centers. So this one, we can actually do a full-sized baseball bat, we can do table legs as well. So I have more spindle capacity, I also have more bowl capacity. The motor is bigger. Now talking about bowl capacity, that's that swing. Here's something that's really cool. If I slide my tool rest out of the way what this one offers is, I can loosen this and I can spin the head stack. This increases my ability to do outboard turning here. So not only does it have a bigger capacity over the bed, but I've also got the ability to mount the bowls out here which further increases the capacity. That's the purpose of this mount out here, I can take my tool rest off, bring it to this side of the lathe and have my tool rest mounted over there. So bigger spindles, bigger bowls, bigger horsepower motor to support that. So it's gonna let me work my machine a little bit harder. I've also got a little bit more weight here. Now, weight and lades is a good thing. We wanna have a heavy machine, so there's a lot of cast iron here. It helps dampen the vibration that you might have when you're first starting your turnings and they're not quite perfectly round yet. Now on the mini lathe, I talked about speed control. It's common that you'll find a step poli there, you will find some many lathes with an electronic speed control. This machine has what's called a mechanical speed control. So the way this one works, let me lock that in place for ya. When I turn this on, I can control the speed on this one by spinning this dial. Here's how it goes. So I started at the low end, that takes me all the way up to the high end or back down to points in between. Now, a couple of things I like about this. Obviously, I don't have to open the hat up move a belt from poli to poli, I'm shifting on the fly. So as I'm working on my turning, I can change the speed fluidly as I go from step to step to step, so it's a lot more convenient with mechanical speed control like this, you do wanna keep in mind that you need to make those speed changes while the machine is running otherwise you are gonna hurt the mechanism inside here. So you wanna make sure that you're doing that on the fly not while the machine is not running. So I'll cap this one off aa little bit deeper reach into your pocket book, but bigger capacity, more weight is gonna let you do bigger turnings little bit less likely, you're gonna pick this machine up and tuck it away when you're done, but you can get mobile basis for some of these machines to help you roll it away when you're done. Now, let's go up one more step. This machine is really a beauty, I'll tell you what, in weight it's about twice the machine that we just looked at. Remember that a lot of weight is a good thing, dampens vibration. We have a bigger bowl capacity on this one. Now out of the box, it's got a short spindle capacity, but like the mini lathe, we can build onto the end to increase that spindle capacity and get the game that we need out there for those big table legs or baseball bats, so we can add that on. Now, the weight is gonna buy us the ability to do big bowls, probably what we want there is also real good control of the RPM. This is a smart lathe. On this one, the speed is actually controlled by a computer, so I can work this a couple of ways. Think of this a little bit like a dimmer on a light that dimmer type switch is what's gonna control the speed of this machine. So on this one, once I'm running, I can dial my RPMs up or down, I can make those speed changes when the spindle is not turning because it's electronic, not mechanical. Now, remember referring back to the mini lathes, I said some many lathes have a system similar to this which gives you that reestablish, that dimmer switch type control of the speed over there. Here on this one, it actually goes a big step beyond that. Remember I said, it's a smart lathe. With this machine what happens is as I'm cutting and I'm applying a load to my work, this is smart enough to know that it needs to provide a little bit more power to maintain RPM. One step beyond that on this machine, if my chisel catches which can happen when you're turning, the machine can actually stop itself so that you don't hurt yourself with a bad catch or you don't break anything on the machine. So it's got a little safety device built in there so that if something is going wrong on your turning it'll automatically stop itself. Then I can turn it back on and reset the system. So the speed control I can dial up and down the speed, I can preset the speed while it's not running and then turn it on. I can also preset various speeds on here. Kind of like programming your radio. I can pick a couple of favorite speeds so I can very, very quickly step up and down to those speeds. The other thing that this provides is the ability to run in reverse. So what I just did here is I pushed the reverse button, it's smart enough that it's warning me that I'm about to run in reverse. Gives me a little beep there, so I'm doing that intentionally. The great thing about reverse is when you're working on bowls sometimes it's easier to cut out here on the outside of the bowl instead of here, then you don't have to lean over the lathe as much. When you get to the sanding step, it's real nice to sand in both directions, sand while it's going forward and sand while it's going in reverse, it gives you a little better surface finish on your project. So the reversing feature is really, really cool. I love that. This one also has the ability to go outboard. So wrapping this one up, bigger price tag, the electronic speed control is a wonderful thing. It's very easy to get spoiled and you're turning by it. We've got bigger capacities and the ability to go further with our spindle turning. If we add the extensions on, the weight is gonna let us do massive bowl turnings on this coupled with a very, very smart speed control that this provides. So we've got kind of a small, medium, large. There's a lathe out there in the marketplace for everybody. I hope this helped you find the one that's best for you.