On my WM18 I just squirt some aerosol white lithium grease through the small hole on to both the spindle gears and intermediate gears while the mill is running slowly. It doesn’t need doing very often. If you ever tilt your mill’s head there may be access to the gears from the back via a thin access plate, which will let you get a better look at what you’re dealing with.

There is no metal-on-metal of the gears on my mill; metal gears couple with plastic.

Putting any significant quantity of oil in the gear case of my mill wouldn’t work too well as the oil would seep out of the rear access port very readily and you would always be left with only about 1/2” of oil at the bottom of the gear case, which would do nothing except prevent rust forming on the gear case’s floor.

As for the quill, I put a thin coat of Mobil Vactra no. 2 or 4 on it. This needs doing even less often than the gears.

I think my hobby mill must have several 1000 hours on it over the 14 years I have had it so don’t take one persons comment as read.

Had the lathe for almost as long, given what the purchase price was I could afford to throw it away about 10 times & buy a replacement and still have a bit of change compared to the cost of a new Myford. So don’t really see anything unfair in that.

For many other products nowadays it is just a web link to download. Other websites, some scammers, are selling that information or flaky scans of manuals for older products. It comes down to costs/profit.
When I got my first lathe some 40 years ago it came with limited screwcutting tables in the manual. So I calculated the missing ones and sent details to the importer for a single A4 sheet suggesting they supply it with every lathe. They responded that it was too expensive – ie they didn’t care and just wanted to slap a label on each package and ship it not bother with customer service.

Makes an old Boxford/Myford/colchester an attractive buy!!!!!

Sums it up really you get what you pay for, buy a car that is 1/10th the price of another and would anyone honestly expect the same quality?

Same with a lathe, my 11″ swing 280 costs about £3k now, I could buy a chinese hardinge copy which is also 11″ swing but it would cost me £25K It would be better made and to a higher spec and I don’t have any expectations that my 280 will be upto the same spec. To get the price that low something has to give and I don’t expect the same from both.

You also only tend to read posts about problems as who is going to start a post just to say nothing went wrong with my lathe/mill this month, year, etc. Add to the fact that they are being produced in vast numbers and shipped all over the world by the container full and the actual percentage of duff ones is likely quite small.

We won’t go into self inflicted damage buy owners expecting a light hobby machine to take the same cuts an industrial machine can.