Ah, Adept blue. Neil will approve

Guilty as charged, m'lud – two lathes………and two milling machines .

Are they both model A bench (rear drive) non-slotted cross slide?
You could CNC one of convert one to metric though a bit of a waste of a capable lathe as it is since less complete ones can be used as a starting point.
Do you have all the accessories like chucks, steadies, metric changewheels, dividing, drilling milling spindle? If funds are a limitation one well equipped lathe is more use that two without the tooling you need. (I don't put QCTP into the list of necessities, just icing on the cake but let's not start a discussion on that here)

edit: and do you have the space for two?

Edited By Bazyle on 19/12/2016 11:40:06

On Boxfords it's best to wait for ones that come with as much gear as possible 'cause the costs stack up if they have to be bought even 2nd hand. I'd say a minimum for many is a 3 jaw, 4 jaw face plate and a fixed steady.

If the lathe has an imperial gearbox it can be persuaded to cut just about any standard pitch with a selection of change wheels. Not sure how this works out on the metric ones but they do come with a usable screw cutting indicator also I think an 8TPI spindle nose thread.

I would avoid the early Model A as I believe it doesn't have the feed arrangements of the later lathe that do this via a slot along the leadscrew.

Some people reckon that the ME10 is a load of crap because of the metal removed from the headstock casting. Take no notice. Your very unlikely to notice any difference and these will have a T slotted cross slide. Designs produced for myfords can simply be packed up to correct the centre height differences, then the same techniques can be used.

Early examples of the modern design can be affordable now. One size fits in exactly the same footprint as the old ones. Take care though. One I looked at had some sort of fault on the screw cutting nut arrangement. Replacement bits are expensive. Things like steadies are also expensive. The other one didn't have much gear with it. By the time I added what I mentioned cost would have been increased a lot. It also had another problem. Various versions need different numbers of change wheels for screw cutting. This one needed loads of them. Some have some additional levers that allow feeds and pitches to be selected over a limited range. These only need a few change wheels to cut the lot, imperial and metric. There also seems to be an in between model. All of them can be found at reasonable prices apart from some joker that did list on ebay. Both of the ones I looked at were under £1000 and not listed on ebay.

I should stick with what I have but can't help looking more to retain value after I am not around. At least that's what I tell myself. I did miss one that I might have bought subject to looking at it. It went very quickly. Just as well really.

John

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Keep both, a second lathe or mill can save hours not having to break down a set up to do secondary operations.