I started turning on a old Craftsman tube style lathe. While not the best lathe in the world it served me well. I learned it's limits and I learned what I liked and disliked about the lathe. This helped me greatly when it came time to buy my next lathe.

The price of new lathes was just more than I wanted to spend. I discovered used lathes were not very common and those that were available were snatched up rather quickly. With my lover of 'Old Iron' I started doing some research into some the older lathes. I found several interesting lathes but it was still hard to find one for sell.

I started watching EBay and I stumbled upon a Brodhead Garret/J-Line which was formally Yates American. The more I read about these the more I liked it. They weight about 550 lbs which is great for turning out of round chunks of wood. They had a 12" swing which was less than I wanted but was acceptable. Reeves drives for variable speed was a plus. The down side was the low speed of 600 RPM's. If you ever turned rough blanks you know at that speed even this lathe will try to walk across the floor till you get it round. Otherwise I liked what I was reading. I found a couple of owners on the net and emailed them asking them about their lathes.

After a couple of months I narrowed my search to Powermatic or Brodhead Garret/J-line. Several of which came up on Ebay. Most were too far away, the owner wouldn't ship it or they just sold to high. Then my lathe was offered by a machine dealer that would crate and ship. After several emails and photo exchanges I bought the lathe sight unseen. Something I never do!

Because I was doing so much of the work on the house myself the lathe had to sit in the garage on the trailer for quite some time. Because I like to work with green rough cut blanks I chose to buy a 3 phase powered lathe. That way I could add a Variable Frequency Drive and have have variable speeds. Once I was able to start working on the lathe I started the hunt on EBay for a VFD.

Skipping forward I found a VFD and installed it on the lathe. I removed the existing magnetic starter and just mounted the VFD in its place. The lathe started up no problem and worked perfectly. After turning on it a short time I realized I had made a mistake. The VFD was in the wrong place. First it was hard to see the controller and adjust the speed. Secondly it was in the way. I found myself constantly bumping into it. A few months latter we moved the controls to the wall and added a box for some extras like reverse and a emergency stop switch.

After using the lathe for a while I am well pleased with my choice. I am starting to think about building an outboard turning rig for it because to my surprise I have found that the 12" dia is sometimes limiting. Of course I knew this one had outboard turning option when I bought it, and that was one of it's selling points for me.