Chester or Warco.

Indeed.

I have an almost unused Boxford 330, but if you want to buy new from Boxford, the cheapest basic short bed 280 is a whisker under £11,000 with the vat, and it is a totally bare spec - it doesn't even come with a 4 jaw chuck.

That's not knocking Boxford, it's well known I am an X10 fan, but just illustrating your point.

A new M300 will be even more money!

There's also probably more secondhand rubbish British lathes on the market than excellent ones too!

Michael

I have wondered exactly the same.

16 years of potentially improving the products since 2001, vs more competition driving prices down.

Something will have to give somewhere.

Hello Michel, Very good question and one which I personally could not answer. I'm sure that there will be other members that have bought earlier machines and then the newer types. Be good to see how they stack up on the QC front.

Regards.

I have never bought from Chester or Warco but do have a Taiwan built 3HP 14"x40" copy of a Harrison M300. Bought second hand it was built in 2001 Importer/brand is Excel. It still produces very good work, I did make a new beefed up cross slide for it and modified some off the shelf feed screw/nut for the cross slide. I bought this after spending over a year trying to find a good Colchester Student or Harrison M300.

My Taiwan lathe ticked all the boxes, both steadies/pratt burnerd three and four jaw chucks/faceplate/Dickson quick change toolpost and a Newall readout. I paid £1000 5 years ago and sold my South Bend "Heavy Ten" to recoup some of the cost. You need to buy on condition, the brand counts for nothing if totally worn out. When I was working we only got five years out of a Colchester Triumph 2000 before replaced with another one, they where knackered after four years but we had them on five year finance deal.

I think that this thread will meander on. All the old chestnuts will be dug up and aired once again!

I think that a central question is "Should suppliers of ANY description, use their customers as their QC department, or should they make an attempt to check out their machines BEFORE they ship them? This applies to second hand machine dealers and to importers of Far Eastern machines.

I am guilty, as are many others, by recounting horror stories. We all know about the problems with any new or second hand machines. At the end of the day, it is the supplier who has the responsibility of making sure that goods are fit for purpose.

Is it really too much to ask of a supplier to actually use the machine for a short test drive before shipping? if this were done then it would stop dead, a lot of the complaints we get here on the forum.

Andrew.

Andrew it is a question of economics, to test drive every machine would mean extra man hours dedicated to that task, the suppliers we are criticising are importing and selling machines which they have to do competitively, any extra operations will inevetiably add to their costs, they have rightly or wrongly calculated that the customer wants a rock bottom price which would preclude paying for extra operations. Is the customer therefore part of the problem?

Dave

Dave there are suppliers which claim to have tested their machines prior to delivery, in my case, as the machines were for export I made sure they actually did test them....that said the lathe came dead on delivery - a loose wire - did they really check it, did the wire come loose during transport? Who knows, at least customer service was good, price was good and machine delivers what I expect out of it...

Maybe we should contemplate the state of the hobby if China did not exist. I suspect that most of us would be seriously underquipped unless we had very deep pockets or/and have large workshops. There must be few typical workshops these days that don't own some sort of a mill to compliment their lathe, something that was rare in days gone by. Sure not much of what comes out of China aimed at the hobby end of the market is anything like a top class toolroom machine but much of the model making in days gone by was achieved on worn out and largely inadequate machines. Chinese imports have transformed what most of us can aspire to and as long as the importers offer proper after sales service to remedy anything that slips through the net I feel we should be pleased with our situation.

regards Martin

But most hobbiests don't want to spend tens of thousands on a more ridgid new industrial machine . They make the choice of a cheaper machine and is it the makers fault if they then find it won't take the same heavy cuts that an industrial one would without flexing.

All these comments are based on what is available from Chesterhobbystore, there is a clue in the name. If you want industrial rigidity get your wallet out and visit their industrial site not the hobby one.

"China are perfectly capable of manufacturing well made good quality items"

Yes agreed but again most hobby users dont want to pay £20,000 for the far eastern Hardinge clones

Edited By JasonB on 21/11/2017 11:39:05

John Ruskin may, or may not, have actually said it ... but this is commonly attributed to him:

[quote]

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.

[/quote]

.

MichaelG.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law_of_business_balance

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 21/11/2017 11:54:57

We don't really know. On average I think it's fairly obvious there's been considerable improvement since Far Eastern machines first appeared in the 1970s. Early magazine reviews are all negative. Today much of the comment reports minor problems rather than major ones, though major issues do still occur.

The centre of production is continually changing. It's moved from Taiwan to mainland China who are undergoing an Industrial Revolution. Their industrial base started primitive and is evolving rapidly. At the moment it's a mix of high-end and low-end production methods not dissimilar to the UK in 1950. (Shipyards doing welding next to shipyards using rivets, modern steel works next to a Victorian Iron Foundry, Jet Aircraft being built by men driving Austin 7s etc.) China faces competition from countries like India who have a similar mix of world-class and primitive engineering.

Making hobby lathes is highly competitive and profits low. It must be very tempting to use 'nearly good enough' castings rather than rejecting them and to not slow production by fixing small faults. On the other hand machine surfaces are accurately made with grinding machines. Early problems with motors, bearings and electronics are mostly solved. Gears and other components are competent rather than polished. However, lathes appear to be assembled in a hurry with minimal attention to cosmetic details. The end result is a mixture of mostly reasonable lathes with some exceptional examples, and some bad. For industrial use, the quality process would reject the bad outright and uplift the reasonable to a specification, paying considerable attention to the details. This is expensive!

I don't think enough lathes are made to justify the quality techniques used to make cars and electronics.

Once hobby lathes are finished, I guess 3 things happen:

• The rejects are sold off locally. It's possible that that these end up on ebay or similar. The risk of getting a dud from an unknown source is higher.
• Some Western outlets pay a premium or otherwise apply leverage to get the best examples for their customers. (Based on fewer moans about them I guess that ArcEuroTrade, Warco, Axminster and Grizzly at least do this to some degree, perhaps also checking a little more carefully before shipping. It doesn't guarantee complete satisfaction, but it lifts them above the average.)
• Other outlets may simply pass on reasonable examples, perhaps after a superficial inspection before shipping. Most of these will be OK, but the risk of getting a clunker will be higher. Your protection is that they will change it.

Customer service is another variable. Company policy might be to resist all but the most justified complaints, or it might be to respond positively even to nitwits and time-wasters. Policies and attitudes to customers change over time and even the best run organisations drop the ball on a bad day. You might ring up when most of the staff are off-sick and the untrained temp has a filthy headache! And there's a reason why most firms don't allow engineers to talk to customers.

Generally I think quality tends to rise, but there are many reasons why it's not universal. For example, as the pound has lost value in recent times, and because UK vendors have to keep prices low, there's likely downward pressure on quality at the moment unless the Chinese have improved productivity to compensate.

I'm guessing really. We would know more if everybody shared their experiences good and bad in a standard form, but we don't. It would also be interesting to be a fly on the wall at, say, ArcEuroTrade to see how Ketan does business and to visit his Chinese suppliers and their facilities. I'd expect most of what goes on behind the scenes to be slick, a fair bit challenging, and some of it heartbreaking. The world's like that.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 21/11/2017 12:00:10

Hell Dave, never mind lathes, you've just summed up the last two years of my life!

A good question.

As you might expect I do get the opportunity to discuss this frankly with several of the main suppliers.

My greatest familiarity is with 7 x 10/12/14/16 mini lathes and the QC on these has got much better and the basic spec has considerably improved with brushless DC motors, increased centre distances, more reliable electronics, lever tailstocks and many detail improvements such as leadscrew swarf guards and down to little things like rubber leadscrew grommets to stop swarf getting inside the control box.

My understanding is that although the bulk of machines are sold in the USA, the sheer size of the market there and possibly lower expectations mean a few disgruntled customers have less impact than in the UK (I have been told). Most of the improvements have resulted from the input of the main UK distributors - who have agents in China/India and regularly go over to see the manufacturers. I know some of my own feedback on machines has gone back to a manufacturer and in at least one case resulted in a new accessory.

I would certainly assert that a 2017 top-spec mini lathe is a more capable and better made/accurate machine than mine which was made in 1998. One almost invisible change is that the first batches (including mine) faced slightly convex, something that was picked and corrected early on as the machines became more popular.

If you look on this forum for early reviews of the SC4-510 from Arc, you will see they originally decided against stocking it, one of the issues being a noisy headstock, arguably caused by poor cleaning/running in of the internal gears. My machine, a current one, does not suffer from this issue at all. In my view there clearly is incremental improvement, largely driven by the desire of the main importers to stay ahead of the smaller ones and also their wish to avoid problems like the one that started this thread. I am sure that the manufacturer will get to see that headstock and get some strong feedback on it.

Neil

You've just summed up perfectly the same culture that exists in quality control the world over, if the customer is willing to pay high enough, then appropriate measures will be taken.

Ironically my experience as a quality Inspector was for making car and electronic components here in the U.K,

You complain that the parts aren't meeting the grade, and unless they're either complaining or paying dear enough for it, it's just shrugged off by the management or shipped out on a prayer that they wont notice it.

One of the applications was for making roller bearings that went into winches, that needed a relatively high surface finish tolerance (I think around 0.15 Ra), you could go three times over that upper limit before anyone even bothered changing the tool.

It's precisely because it's so tempting to just say it'll be okay, when it's so close. The production manager is essentially guessing what the designer or end user thinks is important to them.

Its not a case of what nationality the company belongs to, it's more a case of whether a company has taken quality control seriously, even harder to get them to care when the customer doesn't pay for it.

Michael W

Folks may be interested in this album of pictures sent to me from China by John Stevenson a few years ago when he and Ketan were on one of their factory visits. As you can see it's a typical back-alley sweatshop...

John Stevenson in China

Neil

I'm not comparing against brand new British made. I'm comparing by price i.e. new eastern versus second hand branded. For example, if I had fifteen hundred to buy a milling machine, I'd go look at some second hand branded machines and see the actual machine I was buying rather than "trusting" what came in the crate from the cheap end of the spectrum. You can buy serviceable second hand Boxford lathes for £800 easily. You can buy later high spec Boxford lathes secondhand for £1,500. Like cars, it's not necessarily the age but the mileage and when you come to resell, they usually hold their value. But that's not the only aspect of this. It's about buying a cheap new far eastern lathe and then every week or so, a bolt breaks or a thread strips or the electrics pack up. Again, it's not that all of them are like that but that too many of them are like that.

Edited By Chris Trice on 21/11/2017 13:44:01

Thoughtful of John to include a photo of the mode of transport you and he used to get there

In respect of buying secondhand far eastern lathes, in my case, not a hope. I simply don't trust that the electronic speed control, even if it's working at the time of sale, isn't going to go phut six months later because there are too many stories of this happening. The mistrust is added to by asking yourself why the seller is selling it since the normal action of caution has you considering all the worst case scenarios and it's not difficult, give the stories on this forum, to imagine that it's been a problem machine which the seller is obviously not going to indicate. I liken it to buying a car. Do you buy one you feel reasonably confident is going to drive you around reliably or do you buy one with a reputation for breaking down? Not all cars with a bad reputation break down but do you take the risk?