Chester or Warco.

And to stretch the comparison further.. "if you buy cheap, you can't expect a car to be as reliable". Well, maybe not as reliable long term BUT I don't expect a wheel to drop off in the first week. Even if the dealer changes the car, you're faith in the product is a bit tarnished and you lose the joy and happiness you would otherwise have with your new purchase. I enjoy the buzz I get from buying something. If it turns to disappointment, I lose interest.

Edited By Carl Wilson 4 on 21/11/2017 14:22:49

Just to clarify a post I made in this thread, [ in case some picked me up wrong ] When I used epoxy injection on the Chester LUX it was NOT to repair any fault, it was only as an improvement. Worked fine enough right from the crate [ with the usual cleaning and adjusting of gibs]. Only last year did I decide to strip it down and "improve " the interface twixt head / column and column / base. Apologies for any confusion.

Carl / Rockets both Neil and myself bought far eastern machines long before this forum ever existed we base our comments on actually owning and using them. I'm not even on the payroll so have no obligation to defend or otherwise

My X3 has run fine out of the box since 2007 and the Warco since about 2009 and I think Neil mentioned earlier his minilathe was 1998 well before either of us was involved with ME.

Forty years ago we worked on the simple rule of tens, where process mistakes were costed. If rectified for ten pounds at the design stage, it would cost a hundred if the mistake was found at the production stage, but a thousand if only found when installing. That same problem would typically have cost ten thousand pounds if the subsequent fault required fixing when the process was commissioned. Multiply that by another factor of ten if the failure stopped the process when in full production!

Same principle here. If the quality control checks discarded 'out of spec' parts at the manufacturing stage, the final product would be in spec. Unfortunately this is clearly not occurring. Likely what happens is that selected high spec parts are directed to the product line of those that pay for high quality machines - the lesser spec ones are used for the cheaper lines. Guess what? The dregs are the cheapest!

I once worked for a company that guaranteed a 'very-close-to-zero' failure rate for their products, which were assembled using parts made in the UK and some chinese made component parts. After a couple containers worth of components were simply returned to china, after QC checks in the UK found them to have a higher failure rate than demanded, the chinese suppliers realised their checks needed to be up to the job. They were paid to send only in-spec components, so only in-spec component deliveries were acce

pted.

Who buys the dregs? You decide, as the buyer - you choose to buy the cheaper or more expensive version of the same type of machine.

Loose casting sand inside engine components used to be a particular problem with some Lister clones made in India, for instance. Not good!  Other defects included occlusions in flywheel castings, filled with body filler and painted over. Things which would never have been acceptable when those same engines were made by Lister in the UK.

Edited By not done it yet on 21/11/2017 16:46:50

Carl hits nail on head. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say there's a deliberate attempt to rip anyone off. I'm sure dealers would rather have product go out without any issues and thus happy customers because it's a pain in the a**e for them too. However, I don't think it would hurt if, like Arc do (did), the machine was checked before going out. At least that way, duff ones would be intercepted before getting into the market place which in turn would encourage the factory to turn out better product.

Ditto, and their spare parts service is normally good too. Always someone to pick up the phone there.

I personally, found that there have been a lot of unfavourable stories about chester, so I have never used them, rightly or wrongly, it's saying just why I don't, despite their very good prices.

Michael W

Have you looked at the inside back page of MEW recently?

The truth is, the whole hobby is sustained nowadays by people buying imported machines. I suspect mini-lathes outnumber Myfords on the planet by twenty to one. Or more.

I have seen a pile of about twenty mini-lathes sold in one day at a show.

There simply aren't enough second hand machines available to meet that kind of demand. The sheer volume being sold at affordable prices means there will be unsatisfactory machines that get through, the internet means these get a high profile, especially as many of these are bought by beginners meaning some of the problems are caused by inexperience rather than duff machines.

If we are to continue to have a hobby kept going by the supply of inexpensive machines, then we have to accept this and judge sellers by how they deal with a problem when one occurs.

It is interesting to read Edgar T. Westbury levelling all of the criticisms now routinely fired at imported machines at some (un-named) British ones. He points out that the Schlesinger Limits apply to 'high class industrial machine tools' and not 'lathes to be built at a competitive price with no guarantee in respect of accuracy'... 'In the past, many small lathes were manufactured in which accuracy was very dubious, but in view of their low cost their imperfections were tolerated, and they served the purpose for which they were intended quite well.'

As someone who has had to rely on imported machines to get into the hobby for financial reasons, I feel the knee-jerk responses of some smack of elitism and am sure they have put some people off model engineering. Who wants to be left feeling they can only do second-rate work if their lathe is not some British Classic - a proposition that is wholly untrue and unfair.

You know one of my other hobbies is astronomy. A similar situation exists, except that the supply of old second-hand telescopes is very scant. There are some wonderful scopes made at premium prices in Europe but I don't encounter any of the snobbery around far-eastern telescopes. In fact, it's pretty much accepted the £160 scope which is my mainstay for imaging will give you results comparable to anything else out there for less than a grand.

The whole hobby of astronomy (visual and imaging) is flourishing and attracting people at a far greater rate than model engineering. It has a similar demographic (chiefly empty nesters and retired) and requires similar resources and levels of skill to achieve good results. You do it on a budget or spend what you like.

I can't help feeling that one reason why it flourishes is that when beginners turn up, sometimes with a random purchase or present of a telescope, the typical response is that anything is better than nothing, don't be afraid to go for affordable alternatives as patience and skill is what counts most of all. Believe me, I have seen what a rank beginner can achieve with a car's worth of new kit and what an old hand can do with a cheap scope and a second hand DSLR.

It should be the same with our hobby; what matters in not which machine you have, but how you use it. The overwhelming majority of machines sold today knock the cheap machines Westbury was writing about into a cocked hat in terms of accuracy, fit and finish.

When anyone reports an imported machine as having a fault, the knockers appear like sharks smelling blood. When an old machine has a fault its a 'valuable restoration project'.

.

Well that's enough "Neil has run out of s**te" as someone once said...

That, I agree with as a principle, my contention is that those sorts of faults are now the exception, not the rule, and have been for some years.

The problem is that when someone does experience a significant fault instead of a simple response of 'tell your supplier, they will sort it out', it unleashes a long list of complaints, most of which have been aired many times before. The casual observer notes the number of complaints, not realising the double, treble, quadruple counting...

Yes, problems like this should, ideally, never happen, but I judge any supplier on how they deal with problems as when I buy something I realise perfection isn't always possible so I want good backup.

An excellent example of this is Dyson. Every Dyson product (Great British Engineering at its best) I have ever had has gone wrong, but with their extended warranties and great customer service they will always send you out a replacement part post-haste. (Very relevant as the battery pack on my wife's Li-ion Dyson vacuum seems to have lost 90% of its capacity with two months of warranty to go... at least the clips are better designed these days).

the importers need to sort this instead

Exactly not what the importers should sort out at this end of the supply chain. It should be sorted at the supply end. But if the importers cannot sell the more expensive versions of the same product (the buyers simply think another cheaper supplier is a more favourable deal), they may well no longer exist.

The buyers are the ones that choose to buy a crated machine directly from china (but temporarily stored by the iimporter). How much extra would it cost the dealer to check out everything? The customer would be paying far more than the crated machine which is dropped on their doorstep, for sure.

The company I worked for, that insisted on zero substandard parts, paid for that service. They supplied the specification to be adhered to and the chinese tendered for the contract. The quality clauses were a very prominent part of the specification.

The hobby is expensive for good machinery. It is a shame that some of the hobbyists scratch around for the cheapest machine they can find, then complain if it is substandard in some respect. Profit margins may appear good, but that may not be the real case in practice. But it does appear it is a more cost effective route (to replace) than check over every machine in fine detail.

A new Myford will cost you the thick end of 10k, imagine how good a similar capacity machine from Asia could be for half the money but we choose to spend 10 to 20% of that and complain that some corners are cut a bit to tight. That most of the machines are as good as they are is what I find remarkable. Chester seem to be getting a bit of flack recently, perhaps they have taken their eye of the ball a bit with the hobby machines as they do seem to to be growing their business in other areas. The people who are dissatisfied usually make more noise than those who are satisfied so it is easy to get the picture that there are lots of problems when in reality that is not true.

Mike

I may be imagining this, but didn't ArcEuro use to offer a service to strip, clean, check etc their machines at extra cost ? If so, presumably Ketan has a good idea of exactly how many people are willing to pay extra for a guaranteed ok machine, and I am guessing it is not a lot ....

Ketan said sales actually went up when they stopped offering the service

Just to offer some sort of balance, just over twelve months ago I went to the model engineering show at Stratford, I looked over the offerings from Warco and I was generally ignored, I walked across to Chester and had all my questions answered, I checked over their machines and was happy to order a DB10 Super. Since that time it has performed very well, accuracy is very good. Sure I have re-set the gibs, adjusted a few bits and fitted a larger QCTP, I use a ER32 collet chuck and have achieved very good results.

The machine is not without a concern, please note I said a concern, not a fault or an issue. The concern is that the gears used for screw cutting are not completely concentric on their shaft, I imagine using them for screw cutting could throw up a problem as the gear selector is a rigid arm and idler gear. I have no connection with Chester other than buying the lathe from Chester and being happy with it and I fully understand that some others have bought machines that they are not happy with. I decided to buy Chinese after lots of searching unearthed mainly well worn, noisy, neglegted and over priced used british machinery.

Edited By Ian Skeldon 2 on 21/11/2017 20:32:19

I have a Chester DB8 which I bought about 8 years ago and have been happy with it. My main criticism is that I tried to buy new brushes for the dc motor only to find they are no longer available and the new motor is the best part of £300 that's just the motor no controller. It seems quite a large expense for the sake of two motor brushes.

I think that part of the problem is that the majority of people buying far eastern machines are able to and I suspect like to improve by the very nature of the hobby

By the way I have decided to go the 3 phase and vfd route saving just under £100 - which makes me as guilty as the next person.

Limpet, if you could replace the brushes instead of going vfd/3ph route, I recall reading on here of a company, IIRC somewhere Southampton/Bournemouth way who can make brushes to your requirement. If you have the remains of the brushes you could have them replicated at far less cost than the alternative, should you wish.
I'm sure somebody can come up with the company details.
DaveD

I'll look into that thank you Dave