The expectation I had when I bought this was based on online research and reviews. It is a lathe that you can disassemble to the point where you can lift separate components and put wherever you want without heavy rigging. It will make serviceable cuts on aluminum, brass, and steel- AFTER YOU DO A LOT OF WORK ON IT. It will never be a lathe that you can take heavy cuts and do production work, it just doesn't have the size or mass and never will. Comparable size lathes of heavier construction and delivered quality are more expensive and less portable. You do get what you pay for and mass does count in machine tool rigidity.Many will correctly tell you this is essentially a "kit that arrives assembled". You will need to fully or almost fully disassemble, clean, file, stone, machine, replace some items, and alter some design features before it operates at its weight class capability. Some of these handworking operations are going to wear you out, an example is correcting the variation in thickness at the back of the ways. You can run it without this correction, but it will run better with it. At time of this review, I'm in the middle of that. You'll need the lathe running to make some of the parts to make it run better, expect to take some pieces apart more than once. There is a lot of help for these repairs and upgrades online, no really useful info is in the supplied manual. Everything I've read or seen in videos so far is true - mine came with all the expected original design limitations and final finish/assembly deficiencies.The seller was extremely good to work with. I reported the unexpected issue of lathe way pitting and non-functional lead screw gearing. The lathe pitting is not correctable, but won't affect operation - just looks nasty, the only positive is it will likely help hold oil on the ways just like the way scrapings on higher end machines but less pretty. I expect the gearing problem to be correctable by resetting the control positions and adding spac
V. Pippin 
