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I'm a hobbyist and needed a small lathe for my bench to machine parts, mostly aluminum and brass. I researched all the Chinese 7x mini lathes and decided on the Grizzly 7x14. Grizzly offers great support and a complete parts list, better than HF at about the same price, tad more tho. They are all made in China by one factory, Seig, which are rebranded and some small differences for each retailer. Tho I have not needed the length of it, the 7x10 from other brands didn't allow much room to slide the tailstock out of the way in case you did have something 6" long chucked up. Out of the box, you'll need to clean the Cosmolene off it, set your gibs on the compound table, oil the ways and inspect the machine. It does have a tiny bit of flex to the compound, that is it's worst flaw, but there's many videos on YouTube to help with this! even forums online you can ask this or that about. This is not a toy, but a real machine you can make precision cuts with if you have good measuring instruments. Depth of cuts I get are not what a big lathe will do. on 6061 aluminum and C360 brass stock, I can cut 060 to 070 and still have an ok finish, but it like .040" best. 304 Stainless can do too, but only 030-040 cuts. Machine is quiet, decent torque to make cuts and uses 5/16" bits. get a HF grinder and some HSS bits and grand your own cutters. You might also get a 4 jaw chuck, as the stock 3 jaw does have 003 - 005 runout, but if all you'd like to do is turn some spacers or cut light threads, the supplied chuck is all you need. Oh and a live center tailstock or drill chuck (MT2) is nice to have also. Altogether I have less than $750 in all my lathe tooling and that's 500 cheaper than a used serious heavy lathe or CNC-enabled mini lathe. 1 year using weekly and have had no problems except the gearbox cover was dented in shipping. weighs about 90lbs. I Love it!Read full review
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