Installment 1.

I just thought I would talk a bit about the lathe that I purchased in November 2022 during the H&F sale, and why I settled on the Opti-Turn TU-3008G.

I retired in May that year, and started looking around for a hobby lathe that would fit in a corner of a garage and not cost an arm and a leg. As most people know, there is not a lot of choice for machine retailers in Sydney, H&F is the main one, so I went to their showroom in May to have a look. The showroom is impressive, and I started looking at the smaller lathes and then up to lathes with about 1.5m between centres. I could pick the Taiwanese lathes by their better finish and higher price, but the smallest Taiwanese lathe was too big and expensive for me. I looked online at Asset Plant and Machinery, and also RedFOX Machinery, and while their lathes looked good the logistics of shipping from Melbourne was the deal breaker, it added quite a bit to the cost. Plus their lathes were really too large and expensive for my needs.

My constraints were:
1. The machine should not be too heavy as I need to get it off the trailer and onto a bench, by myself with the help of an engine hoist;
2. The budget was no more than $4000 for the lathe, with $2000 for tooling;
3. It needed to be a full metric lathe with a metric leadscrew;
4. It needed to be 240V, single phase.

On the H&F website, you can put some of those constraints in, and that narrowed my choices considerably. The TU-3008G was just over the top end of my budget, but the lathe below it, the AL-320G, had a motor that was only half the size of the TU-3008G, and the tooling size and centre distance was smaller, but it did come with a 4 jaw chuck and steady rests. In the end to lure of German design and quality control overcame the impact of having to pay more for the TU-3008G compared to the AL-320G, however, the quality control was a bit shoddy as I will detail later. So now it was a wait for the sale while I did a bathroom renovation in my house.

In November, H&F had their twice yearly sale and the TU-3008G was reduced to within my budget, so at the end of November I went with trailer in tow and picked up a lathe. And also an engine hoist, plus a few extras such as a insert tool kit, drill chuck and arbor, live centre, 4 jaw chuck, fixed and travelling steadies, QCTP and a face plate. I looked at getting the stand for the lathe, but on closer inspection there was a lot of wasted space in the stand, with only three small drawers on one side, and a small cupboard on the other side, and it cost nearly $500. I decided to buy some steel and fabricate my own stand.

So when I got home, I had to assemble the engine hoist, then unpacked the lathe on the trailer and lift it into the garage. This is where the first quality issue became apparent. The manual, which I quickly skimmed through, instructed that to lift the lathe you had to put the sling through the webs in the bed. This meant quite a low grip, and the lathe hung at a precarious angle to the point it was leaking oil, either out of the spindle or the gearbox. It was not in the air long, as I pulled the hoist into the garage and lowered the lathe onto the hoist legs, so it did not lose a lot of oil.. Later that night, I was looking at all the paperwork that came with the lathe and noticed a sheet of paper that said to lift the lathe you had to put one end of the sling around the spindle behind the chuck, and the other end through a web in the bed. I tried that and the lathe hung almost level.

So the issue was that the manual was dated 2018, the lathe was made in 2022, and the online version of the manual was dated 2021 and had the correct lifting procedure in it. You would think that when you pay just under $4000 for a lathe they would include the latest manual! There are other errors in the printed manual, for example, the leadscrew has a pitch of 2.5mm, but the manual says it is 3mm, and the gear on the spindle has 48 teeth but the manual says 40 teeth. The bolt pattern for the chip tray also had the incorrect dimensions.

The next step was to design a stand and weld it together. That actually had an elapsed time of 5-6 weeks, as it was now school holidays and the festive season, and we went up north to visit family. I will post some pictures of the stand build in the next day or so. It would be early January 2023 before I got to use the lathe.


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