I understand that. In my opinion a lathe is more useful than a mill. With the right tool post attachment, you can do a number of milling operations on a lathe. I have a Harbor Freight lathe - the one that was a step up from their mini lathe, but they don't appear to sell it anymore (8x12, iirc). The cast/machined parts on it are ok; the motor plate arrived really bent and it was missing a shoulder bolt for one of the handwheels - that's the first part I made on it. It doesn't have variable speed (except by adjusting belts). That's one thing I'd love on it. It would also be nice if it had a carriage lock and a quick lock for the tailstock. Those things are modifiable, though. Be prepared to spend another $600-$1,000 on tooling; though obviously you won't need to all at once. Once it's all dialed in, it's actually pretty good - you can easily hit accuracies of .0005" on it. From an "unfixable - that's just the way it is" perspective, the leadscrew for the carriage is what it is. Since it serves the purposes of cutting threads as well as carriage movement, it doesn't get particularly fine; but that's not that much of an issue. If you want a finer finish than you can achieve with the leadscrew, you can always move the carriage by hand, or simply polish the part with some emery cloth - which is common practice anyway. But I've found that for almost everything, it's not necessary. Having reverse is nice too (not all lathes have reverse).
Ideally, you'd want a lathe large enough to turn brake rotors on. But I quickly discovered going much over an 8" swing starts to get really expensive (and heavy) really fast. If I could've found a good condition vintage american made lathe for a good price (like a South Bend or similar), I would've bought it. Perhaps not surprisingly, machine tools around DC are not plentiful. So it is what it is. Overall, for what I've been able to do with it over the years, it's more than paid for itself, and the ability to quickly make small parts (fittings, washers, custom bolts, standoffs, motor mounts, event making a custom tool or two) is irreplaceable. I use both my mill and my lathe with about the same frequency, but about half the mill work could be done on a decent drill press and/or the lathe.
Here she is, in situ:
In fact, in the last couple of days, I've been using it quite a bit late at night. I made standoffs for the LMT motor support out of an old weedwhacker shaft tube with some slip fit and loctited plugs at the end for centering and structure - that keeps the weight way down and drilling a hole that long through solid stock is possible, but a pain in the butt:
I also had to make thread adapters for the stand offs; the threads in the blower case are a really odd size (esp. considering everything else on the blower is SAE; these holes were metric). I can guarantee that nobody on earth stocks M12 x 1.75 to 5/16" UNC thread adapters:
