Enco just had some on sale, now it is over and doesn't look like there's any in this months flier. I was over at Gary's last week or so and from what I can see, save your money and get something bigger and one of the most important options that I could see was the auto drive function. Forgive my terminology..I know little, especially about metal lathes. The cutter is mounted in a sled that can go 3 different directions. You need at least 2 directions of course, you must have front and back and side/side movement. Well the auto drive performs the side to side movement for you. Your side movement obviously is the cutting, plunge in travel sideways. Now you can turn the dial and manually move the cutter across the piece, but if your movement is not uniform, the cut will not be smooth and even, and too fast could cause chatter or who knows what. The auto drive is adjustable for speed and moves completely uniform across, so you mostly just have to control the depth. Also, having a larger lathe, means the tail stock is not in the way of all your accessories. As you know, a collet chuck shortens your bed length as it sticks out some. The width of the sled again takes up room, You want to get behind a bar stock perhaps to do some tooling but have to remove the tail off the machine, and it is heavy. A bigger machine, you don't have the problem, you just slide it back out of the way. I don't know..these are things I've been told and had some observation of the tool being used as well. Anyone is welcome to disagree or say I don't know, and that's fine. The always have some clearance lathes on the website for Enco.
