There are many many opinions on these lathes. You'll need to do a lot of reading of old threads. I would also look at what kind of lathe folks whose work you respect are using. For example, I seem to recall the Widgitmaster has a Birmingham lathe? I could be wrong on that, but he has one of the Chinese lathes.
There is also a Yahoo 12x36 lathe group. Join that and read all of their threads.
There are just a few common threads I've teased out of all this:
- If you are coming from a 9x20, nearly any 12x36 or larger lathe is going to seem like a phenomenal improvement. Even the Harbor Freight lathes seem to be well regarded by their owners if all they've used before that was a 9x20.
- Three phase gives a better finish than two phase. I don't know how much of this is due to the coincidence that the three phase is often only offered on more expensive lathes, but there you have it.
- More mass (e.g. a heavier machine) is better.
- All things considered, a lathe made in Taiwan is better, but may cost twice as much as a Chinese lathe.
Customer service is an interesting and hotly debated topic. I can find you a post from someone somewhere praising support and another post hating support from any manufacturer you want to name. I concluded a long time ago that if you are buying Asian machine tools, you need to be able to work on them a little bit. Even the big dollar CNC machines talked about on the PM boards seem to often show up with a surprising amount of issues. Witness the Haas that Zumba mentions (and I can find a bunch of fellas who will praise Haas and likely even that same lathe, LOL!).
Here is the short list of machines I'm looking at:
Acer Dynamic 1340G
Acer Dynamic 1440G
Birmingham CT-1440G
Birmingham LUX-1340G
Birmingham YCL1440
Enco 308-0233
GMC GML1440BGF
GMC GML-1440HD
Grizzly G9730 13x40
Jet 321810 GH-1340W-1
KBC GRIP-1440G
Sharp 1340VS
They range in price from $3200 to $9300. All have good reviews. Most have a bad review or two as well somewhere. At some point you pays your money and takes your chances.
Best,
BW  |