Used lathe opinions

trevj said:
What I recall of the NAIT course was that it was very expensive, and that they seemed to be perpetually out of students enough to actually run it, even if you were signed up. I looked in to it when I was working in Edmonton in the early 2000's, so I may be quite out of date.

Not sure if the Alberta Model Engineers Network is still active, they were meeting at Arby's on the South side of Edmonton about once monthly.LOTS of talented guys there!
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Seems to be $575-670 a course to enroll. 4 courses, and about 45 hours per course spread over about 6 weeks, material extra. Seems fair value for hands on learning for a guy that doesn't know much in that field. As far as how many people, I'll find out how that goes. They open enrollment in March, so I'll find out more then.
 
Kevin M. said:
Seems to be $575-670 a course to enroll. 4 courses, and about 45 hours per course spread over about 6 weeks, material extra. Seems fair value for hands on learning for a guy that doesn't know much in that field. As far as how many people, I'll find out how that goes. They open enrollment in March, so I'll find out more then.
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I hope you have better luck than I did. As per the comment above about SAIT, when I was interested, there was a perpetual lack of folks to be able to get them to run the course. Kept getting waitlisted and cancelled. I think at the time, I was looking at around $800, for essentially 6 two hour sessions.
 
I just did my first year machining at Nait back in september, and their gunsmithing course is in full swing from what I hear. Last i checked it was 1 or 2 courses over 6 weeks, on weekends and you do need a machining prerequisite and it looks like things have changed since that time cause I just checked on their website and its now split into 4 courses. If you are looking for lathe and have contacts with a technical school, sometimes they will auction off their old equipment for dirt dirt cheap, and their machines are all well maintained cared for. Not information people usually know, one of the instructors shared it with me, you just need to be in the know and be patient.

For those looking at grizzly/craftex/king machines, they work fine if you are willing to be patient and know the limitations of the machine especially with the really small low horsepower mini lathes/ mills. **Just understand that all those lathes you see on the marked branded as king canada, grizzly, or craftex are all the same. They come from the same factory in china and are just painted different colours**. With atlas lathes we had one back in hs, and it was a piece of garbage, but I was able to get it to work within my means, you just need to get familiar with the machine and how it reacts when it comes to machining i learned that it has a lot more to do with machinist skill and understanding how things are going to react than it is the machine itself. There are machinists i know who can make more than accurate parts on the poorest of machines (Im not one of them yet), Personally if I were to buy a lathe I would buy a colchester, just cause I have a soft spot for them. I got into machining and firearms at around age 15, and a colchester student lathe was what I first learned on.
 
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