Hi
I purchased this lathe in April from the new Warrington store and I'm delighted with it. It has several positive features:
• The speed control is smooth and quick, there is little or no ramp up time.
• It is very quiet.
• It is portable with two lifting handles, one at each end of the lathe.
• It has a substantial size spindle at M33 x 3.5 and MT2 head and tailstock.
• It has a 24 position indexing system.
• The on/off/speed control can be positioned wherever is convenient.
• It has a great speed range, which is one of my requirements as I do a lot of thread chasing and it makes changing the speed very simple and quick.
I have made a bench for it which clamps onto a knock down stand so I can transport it to my woodturning club events. The bench also has castors so once it’s out of the shed it can be wheeled to the car.
There are a couple of things that could be improved:
• A template of the base would be useful to make the hole positions on the bench to make it easy to drill the holes for the fixing bolts as these are inside the lathe footprint.
• The inverter and speed readout seem a little vulnerable and could be damaged if you plan the move the lathe on a regular basis. It would seem (on the face of it) relatively easy to make these demountable by inserting a couple of connectors in the cables. I haven’t done this as I didn’t want to invalidate the warranty so I've got around this by making the bench bigger than the overall footprint and then I’ve built a simple plywood box (without a base or top) which I drop over the lathe and latch it to the bench. So when it’s in the back of my vehicle it’s protected from damage.
I think this lathe offer great value for money. I bought it as a second lathe which I could transport but I shall also be using it on a regular basis in the shed as well.
Here's the link to the Axminster page:
http://www.axminster.co.uk/axminster-axminster-aw1416vs-woodturning-lathe-prod834297/Cheers Dave
