/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>1318121
>no carriage with the associated cross slide
See the above catalog page I linked. They sold them and they are still available if a bit difficult to find. There are also people that have made other manufacturer's models fit other machines. Every company that sold combination lathes made them. Picture related.

>no lead screw, no gears for threading
You've got me there. I never said it was a total replacement for a metal lathe, I just said it was a lot better than anything you could get from HF for the price.

>the bed itself isn't precision ground or scraped
This is versus a Harbor Freight lathe. The only precision involved in an HF tool's construction is the word printed on the box. You can spend under $200 to make a better machine then the $300 HF model. Is it as good an old Logan, Atlas, or South Bend? Hell no. For light duty work, though, it is much better than some Chinesium hunk of crap.

>I don't think they generally don't have much travel on the tailstock, either; just enough to push a center against a workpiece
They have full travel. You can move the tailstock up so it is touching the headstock. Which, OP, I recommend you do when buying a lathe, any lathe, to make sure everything is true.

> I was considering picking up a LeBlonde lathe...
Again, this is for light duty work and in comparison to an HF lathe. Pulling out LeBlond, Clausing, etc and trying to compare it to these is like saying you shouldn't bother with a Toyota Tacoma pickup because it is not nearly as capable as a Unimog.

>keeping an eye out on eBay/craigslist for a score
There is no way you will ever find a metal lathe that isn't a clapped out pile of rust for anything near the price range we are talking about. I've been looking for one for years and they generally bottom out at around $500 for something that is missing parts and needs tons of work.