Member postings for Martin Hamilton 1

It would be interesting to here from anyone else that has purchased a Wabeco D4000 lathe in recent times & their views & experience with their particular machine. At the same time if anyone that had been considering getting a Wabeco D4000 lathe that have been put off by the experience of owners on this thread.

Yes I to have been looking at the Toolc 1014 brushless lathe for some time & would also like to here some feedback, I know their are various makes Warco etc etc that offer basically the same machine as this. All be it the Warco 180 that is only 300mm between centres but also with a less desirable brushed motor. The 400mm between centres on the toolco 1014 is also more desirable for me + the brushless motor. I also looked at the various make lathes going up a bit in size like the WM240 & WM250 lathes but not to sure whether either of these larger much heavier lathes are a bit overkill in size & weight.

Another area I found the lathe to be not rigid & flexing was when you were tuning down a piece of stock & were turning up to a shoulder, if you turned into the shoulder even just a few thou with the tool the chatter was significant. I have never had a lathe do this with such a light touch, personally I think Pro Machine Tools should drop selling this lathe as this is 2 very unsatisfied customers with the same machine bought around the same time & very similar complaints about the Wabeco D4000 lathe.

Parting of with this lathe was also very poor indeed, I had to go down to a 1mm wide parting blade to stand any chance at all. Materials like stainless & any thing slightly tougher than en1 steel forget using a parting tool, the bed casting was also very poor quality especially around the bracing between the bed. I have seen far better quality castings on the various make Chinese lathes around. Some one told me at the time when I ordered my lathe that their was a longer delay on delivery to customers due to the foundry that cast the beds having problems & they have had to find another casting suppliers.

I to had issues with the tailstock alignment also as Nick mentions the weight biased to the front of the tailstock, their is so much weight on the front it tips the tailstock when the locking handle is undone. I found when sliding the tailstock along the bed I had to keep my hand on the tailstock base to hold it flat on the bed. Otherwise you were sliding it with the front edge of the tailstock digging into the bed & wearing the bottom of the tailstock base at its front & also scraping the bed. The tailstock footprint is way to small where they also notched a square out of the base to get the tailstock closer to the headstock due to the carriage preventing the tailstock moving close enough to the headstock. When the lathe was brand new their was around .006" back & forth movement on the cross slide, After just a few months very light work this became .012" & bearing in mind their is no adjustment to take the slack out of the cross slide nut ( no split nut ). I simply could not use indexable carbide tools on this lathe due to too much movement in the slide & general flex in the machine, had to use hss tools. The finish was also pretty poor unless you were taking a very fine finishing cut. Vibration was also very bad above 50% & once up to 60% it really shook, 60% up to max speed was unbelievable not just re vibration but also noise. I simply cannot believe this lathe has a hardened bed, I dropped the tailstock chuck key whilst tightening the chuck & it put a small mark in the bed, I also caught the bed with a piece 12mm steel bar when removing from the 3 jaw which also marked the bed.

Just to give an idea of how badly designed the lathe is I bought the model that came with the 125mm 3 jaw chuck ( went with the higher cost Bison chuck ). I had a piece of 44mm diam aluminium in the chuck ( chuck max diam for standard jaws is max 50mm diam ). Only to turn the lathe on with an almighty crash, what had happened is where the jaws protrude out from the chuck body they hit the 10mm steel pivot bar that holds the Perspex safety guard. Completely mangling this 10mm bar & guard, the largest diam you can fit in the chuck without the jaws hitting this bar is 42mm diam. I was also concerned as to whether this would have done any damage to the headstock bearings or headstock alignment. I contacted the UK supplier & they never had a clue that this could happen, im afraid that most of the current machine tool dealers just sell their products. I have asked a number of UK dealers technical questions about their machines & most simply don't have a clue. In the end I contacted the technical dept at the Wabeco factory in Germany over this issue. they also never had a clue that this could happen with their D4000 when fitted with the factory fitted 125mm chuck & that due to this issue being raised they were going to redesign the guard pivot bar so that this wont happen in future ( not sure if they did this mod on future machines ). When I asked them how this problem was not known to them they told me they didn't sell that many D4000 with the larger 125mm chuck so wouldn't know that this would be a problem. So much for so called quality German engineering.

I can confirm all what Nick is saying re the Wabeco D4000 lathe, I had the misfortune to order a new D4000 in Feb 2016 which arrived in May 2016. This is a terrible piece of kit & would warn anybody to stay well clear of Wabeco, I was so disappointed with this machine that I sold it after only 6 months at a massive loss just to get rid of this machine. To give you some idea I paid £2800 + around another £1000 for extras, I sold it to a machine dealer for £600 just to get some money back.

I agree with every thing Nick has said about the Wabeco D4000 lathe including his previous reviews, I made the mistake of ordering a new D4000 that was deliverd to me in May 2016. What an heap of junk this machine is, so much so im replacing it with what I should of bought in the first place. Yes a Warco, having owned 2 myfords a Chinese 918 & the last 20 years I had an Emco Maximat v10p, I decided I wanted to stick with a European made lathe thinking it would be a quality machine @ around £4000 that I paid for the Wabeco including some accessories. How wrong I was, I cant even bring myself to selling the D4000 to some one else only for them to find out the hard way that this lathe is rubbish. Im standing the loss & simply replacing this machine, don't be fooled by so called German quality as I was.