TBH if I were building a modern lathe without access to the precision tools I have, I’d probably stick to granite-epoxy casting a bed and buying linear bearing rails and ball screws off some import website. In fact for like a ridiculously small amount I could see making a nice benchtop lathe, even a CNC-ready one, for under $1000.
The real challenge would be in the headstock, but that’s not insurmountable.
What I’ve learned from playing with CNC, and seeing how my Haas machines behave vs my old DIY CNC conversions from manual mills, there’s very little to be gained at a hobby-level by actually using scraped ways when linear rails are so well made and so affordable.
And in a lot of ways the epoxy cast frames are far superior to using, say, a welded steel frame, and in some ways even a step up from the cast-iron frames used in industrial machines.
I was surprised to see that it’s only an hour long. And then I considered that maybe my perception was just skewed by the six hours of Tokimeki Memorial, but no, everything else on Tim’s channel is like three hours or more.
That’s just Part Zero, and it’s over an hour long.
There be more parts.
I picked 1 and 3 but those seem like a fairly safe and pedestrian runthrough, nevertheless by the conclusion I felt pretty satisfied that I had gotten a complete review considering it was still around 4-hours of content: so, it worked! But, still there was clearly missed content, and I probably will go for multiple playthroughs, even when the conclusion is fairly difinitive, i still want to experience the various facets in their depth, in their time.
