Santa was good enough to leave an Axminster Sieg C0 lathe under the tree for me this year.

Having just returned from a work visit to China, I took the new machine ( still in its packaging ) out to the workshop. I cleaned off the transport grease to find the ground faces of the bed and crosslide badly stained – not sure what with, looks like it came out of the grease.

Another of our excellent machine and tool suppliers suggests that machines should be stripped down, cleaned and adjusted before use, so, armed with my Allen keys I waded in. The first thing I noticed were the burrs on all the edges of all the machined faces – all around the crosslide and saddle. I carefully de-burred everything, finalised my cleaning and started re-assembling the crosslide. When sliding the crosslide along its ways, there is a tremendous tight spot in the mid-travel area – measured across some dowel pins, this amounts to 0.05mm – I can't see anything obvious, so I suspect just poor machining. The gib strip looks like it has been chopped out of sheet steel with a cold chisel – it must be at least 0.5mm out of flat end-to-end and it's only 50mm long !

I also had a quick look at the motor to spindle vee belt and pulleys – the edges of the vee belt are already shreaded and the belt doesn't sit flat in the vee. I laid a steel rule across the face of the pulleys to find that the motor pulley wobbles about 2mm and the spindle pulley about 1mm and additionally that the pulleys are about 3 -4mm out of alignment ( very difficult to check accurately with the wobble in the pulleys ).

That's enough for me, Santa having spent about £300 on the machine – it will have to go back !

Anyone else had this sort of problems with similar machines ?

Just spent half an hour looking at the Cowell's 90ME – in a different class by the look of it – but at a very different price.

Whilst I am quite prepared to admit that all the faults could be rectified for £2786.40, this is irrelevant. The additional 'features' could have quite simply never been included – I never supply equipment to my customers in such a state whatever price the customer pays.

As a teenager, I started building a Tich and proudly presented some parts to a friend of my fathers ( time served toolroom turner ) who immediately commented "take those bloody burrs off"!

So, having been through a 5 year apprenticeship at Colchester Lathes, I have applied the teachings of the instructors ever since, making sure that precision is ensured at each stage of manufacture.

This afternoon, I popped in to Axminster ( local Nuneaton branch ), had a fiddle with the display machines and discussed my machine with their after-sales specialist. He agreed to swap out the machine, but he will check over their boxed / stock machine first then give me a ring.

No less that I expected really – I'll keep you posted.