What you need to know before buying a lathe

Let’s Talk Money

If you’re financially squeamish, this might not be the right story for you. We’ll finish out this series by significantly increasing our investment of space, time and money, but we’ll also significantly increase our capabilities. We’ll cover our purchase of a lathe in this installment, then talk about our Bridgeport vertical knee mill next time. 

These are real tools that cost real money, and you’ll need to budget a few thousand dollars to follow along at home. On the bright side, you can accumulate these machines and tools gradually, and if you buy right, they’ll actually appreciate in value as you build parts. 

Why a Lathe?

Lathes and mills may look different, but they’re remarkably similar. The lathe spins the work while holding the tool steady, while the mill spins the tool while holding the work steady. 

Seriously, that’s all there is to defining the genres. We’d call them complementary tools, and every well-equipped machine shop has both. If you can only have one, though, we recommend starting with a lathe. 

The basic layout of a lathe is simple: There’s a bed with ways, on which the carriage slides back and forth. One end has the head stock assembly and spindle, which holds the spinning part, while the other end has a moveable tailstock, which holds the drill chucks, centers and more. To build parts, metal is put into the chuck mounted on the spindle, then tools are attached to the carriage and used to cut the metal. 

What can you build with a lathe? “Round things” is the standard answer, but part of being a machinist is figuring out how to use the tools at hand to solve the problem–even if that means using the tools to make new tools. 

Rule number one: There are no rules. As long as you don’t do something unsafe, just about any combination of tool, setup, machine and technique is fair game if the result is the part you were hoping to create. 

A skilled operator can use a lathe to make bushings, spacers, shafts, hubs and more. Basically, if a part can be drawn with cones, spheres and cylinders, you can probably make it on a lathe. 

And that’s before you get creative. With the proper attachments, you can also use a lathe for light millwork, like cutting a keyway or milling a slot, or for some more specialized techniques, like winding your own springs. 

We’ll explain it this way: Some tools are obviously designed to do one thing out of the box incredibly well, like a balljoint press or an inner tie-rod removal kit. Other tools, like a vise, don’t have any obvious purpose or project out of the box, but over time you wonder how you could ever live without one on your bench. 

Lathes fall firmly into the latter category. Drag one home and you’ll soon realize why every great shop has a lathe in the corner. 

How to Buy a Lathe

“I think I’m going to bid on a mill at this furniture auction.” 

That was how we opened our phone call to Steve Eckerich, lifelong friend, machinist and advisor when it comes to our every tool purchase. His response was a sigh, an explanation of how to evaluate a used mill, and then a simple statement: “If I could only keep one tool in my entire shop, it would be my lathe. Are you sure you want to start with a mill?”

Damn right we were. After all, buying that crappy mill from the back corner of an off-brand couch auction would open up a whole new world of building parts, and we couldn’t wait to bid it up to the top of our budget–just $300.

We watched the bidding unfold: $50, $100, $150, $200, $250, $300 and…. 

Nowhere near sold. That tiny off-brand bench mill sold for more than twice the cash in our pocket, and a smirking old man opposite us in the crowd became its new owner. 

The group walked over to the next lot, a lathe that looked like something you’d buy out of a Sears catalog at the train depot, and the bidding began: $50, $100, $150, $200…SOLD. 

Shockingly, we were holding the winning paddle. Maybe it was fate, maybe it was divine intervention, or maybe Steve Eckerich really is that powerful. We’d just bought our first lathe. 

Meet Our First Lathe

What does $200 buy in the used lathe market? If you’re as lucky as we were, you’ll get a 1938 Craftsman 6-inch lathe, also sold under the Atlas brand name. We also received a few buckets of random tooling, some extra chucks, milling and taper attachments, and a stand to put it all on. 

If that read like Greek to you: same. 

Our Craftsman lathe was serviceable, but ultimately too small for our needs. 

We had no idea what we’d purchased, but over the next few years we slowly learned the ropes of maintaining and running a lathe. We learned that 6-inch refers to the maximum diameter of work that can be turned. We learned that our lathe’s antique “lantern” tool post was frustrating and slow when changing tools. 

But we used it. There are parts made on that Craftsman on our LS-swapped 350Z and our Isuzu Trooper. Thanks to YouTube videos, we were able to learn how to run a lathe effectively, even when cutting tough metals like stainless steel.

But we also learned that, above all else, our lathe was just too small for what we wanted to do.

After giving the little Craftsman a bath, a tune-up and a modern quick-change tool post, we sold it to a friend for $500. We credit the pandemic for most of our lathe’s appreciation, but this is also a great example of how well these sorts of tools hold their value.

Building a Lathe Shopping List

Our first lathe wasn’t great, but it was a great learning exercise. We kept a wish list every time we used it for a project, culminating in the following:

1. Rigidity: This is the primary differentiator between a good machine tool and a bad one–same as how, when it comes to engines, there’s no replacement for displacement. Two strong people could pick up our Craftsman lathe, which was great for relocating but bad for staying rigid while cutting metal. We wanted our next lathe to be a giant hunk of metal that would allow deeper cuts. 
2. Power: A rigid machine that can take deep cuts is pointless if those cuts stall the motor, so we needed more horsepower from our next lathe. 
3. Gears: We wanted a quick-change gearbox, which allows the gear ratio between the spindle and the leadscrew to be changed quickly for threading operations. Changing the thread pitch on our Craftsman required replacing gears on the back of the lathe, called change gears, to vary the ratio. We wanted to simply pull a lever when cutting threads. 
4. Work Envelope: Six inches just wasn’t enough to get the job done. We wanted to be able to cut larger-diameter parts. More importantly, we wanted a larger-diameter through hole in our spindle; that way we’d be able to insert axle shafts in the chuck without having 3 feet of stickout. 

Buying a Better Lathe

Wishlist in hand, we cruised Facebook Marketplace for a few months until we stumbled across our next lathe: a rusty JET 1236PS on a homebuilt stand. The asking price was just north of $1000, and its location was less than 45 minutes from home. After talking the seller down to $700, we loaded up our newest acquisition with the help of the seller’s old tow truck and headed home.

Start buying real tools, and you’ll need a real plan to drag them home. Ours involved a tow truck, flatbed trailer, engine hoist and car skates. 

What exactly is a JET 1236PS? This imported machine is about 40 years old and definitely one solid step up from the Craftsman. It’s about the best machine we could reasonably fit into our garage and budget. It weighs about 800 pounds and has a 12-inch capacity with a 36-inch-long bed–hence the 1236 in its name. It also has the other niceties on our wish list: a quick-change gearbox, a much bigger motor and a quick-change tool post.

We spent a week or so getting our the JET ready for action, which meant a thorough wipe-down with ATF, replacing the seals around the spindle, and rewiring the motor to plug into a 220V outlet. Along the way, we got to take an intimate look at our new lathe’s condition and realized it was in great shape–we’d rolled the dice and gotten lucky. Finally, we had a real lathe in the garage. 

Meet our newest tool, this JET 1236PS. For just $700, it wasn’t perfect but didn’t have any major flaws. We cleaned it up, fixed the wiring, replaced a few seals and started making parts. 

But we soon realized that, just like pet guinea pigs, pet lathes are happier with a buddy. In our quest to build the best parts possible, we’ll find a milling machine companion for our lathe in the next installment and take our home machine shop to the next level.