i have ran several mori seikis and they are a very good machine, okumas arent bad, but not as good as a mori, ikegai lathes are comparable with okumas, but i thing the best lathe for the money is dmg-gildemeister, they arent as much as mori but are impressive and comparable to mori seiki, if you are looking for something used you may want to look at hitachi seiki, they no longer make machine tools but i think they made great lathes to start with, only dislike i had was the kv tooling setup on them, they are fast, rigid, and crash-proofed better than most in my opinion. i ran 2 hitachi ht-20's and paid 26k each, and we ran the hell out of them, they were jobs that the part-timers ran and they got more than there fair share of crashes and they came back every time for more, a salesman told me the ht-20 was one of the most mass produced machine tools ever made, im sure you can find lots of them on ebay and on the net from 10k-20k, and they are worth it |