On 5/15/2015 7:54 AM, Gene Heskett wrote: > OTOH, I could be tempted to throw more $ at it, and get a South Bend 8k > from Grizzly, on sale for a hair under 2g's, but by the time it would be > up and running by LCNC, I'd have around 5g's in it. Just the stand is > another $930, and the same size chuck I have now is another $250. > Carriage drive screw is 38"/965mm long, so the cheap 16mm I have now > would grow to a 25mm and to around $300. No clue how much room for the > crossfeed screw could be found.
A close examination of that "South Bend" looks like it's dipped into the 9x parts bin for the saddle and compound slide. Everything else is different. Different bed, tailstock and headstock. Drive belt is poly-V so that's better. Timing belts instead of change gears are quieter and cleaner but it doesn't even have the half-way 9 speed gearbox most of the 9x lathes do. What they needed to do is what I wrote in another e-mail. Start with the typical 9x. Add two lever gearbox. Add reverse gear. 4 bolt or round dovetail compound mount. Change weedy belt to poly-V. Make it look nicer. Those few things would make a quite nice lathe. Grizz-Bend just did the belt and spent a lot on making it look nicer. Altering almost all the parts of a poor design without actually improving the poor design doesn't make a better lathe. Might be more rigid, have more power and more expensive spindle bearings but all the *easy to fix* faults are still there. The lathe is a turd with a very expensive polish, no wonder they're trying to get rid of them at a big discount. If they'd design a gearbox and reverse retrofit kit, and ditch the timing belt drive to the lead screw, the investment could be salvaged - but it'd still have the 8" swing working against it. Perhaps they didn't want to make it "too good", thinking it might "cannibalize sales" from more expensive models. Same dumbarse thinking Apple Computer did with crippling the hardware of lower models like the IIsi, LC and LC-II so they wouldn't take sales away from the upper models like the IIci and IIfx. Yeahhhh, sure. As if anyone back in the 90's contemplating dropping $10K on a Mac would ever have for a second considered buying anything but the IIfx. Someone looking to buy a 10" or larger lathe is not going to buy a 9" or 8" no matter how it's equipped. Crippling smaller/cheaper products' design mostly serves to get a company stuck with a bunch of product that doesn't sell as well as it would had it not been deliberately poorly designed. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. http://www.avast.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
