After owning a small 6 inch Sears Craftsman lathe, my first new lathe purchase was a Busy Bee Rong Fu 12x40 lathe, along the lines of a CX707 belt driven.. Paid 1200 in 1982 and I was thrilled. Then the reality came and shook hands. The tailstock was angled pointing down to make it line up to the head. When I removed the Tailstock I saw they had used an angle grinder to grind down the base to achieve a meeting of the centers. I spent the whole winter hand scraping the bottom of the tailstock and got it level, finally.
Now of course it was higher by 14 thou above the headstock centerline. So I removed the headstock fearing they had angle ground the base of the headstock. They hadn't. They had ground the lathe base instead, and really gouged it.
So I stripped the lathe down completely, and took it to a machine shop 40 miles away to have them plane the base of the headstock flat in the plane of the ways. The company refused to touch it, but I looked so desperate they said they would let me do it myself on their shaper. I said ok. Never used a shaper in my life.
I came back in the morning with a fist full of shims and feeler gauges, and set out to do this while shop life went on about me. It took me all 6 hours of work to line up the ram and the base and shim it all into line. Then I started cutting the casting. I had to remove 30 thou to get the divots out of it. Done.
I stripped it all out and lugged the bed into my car, cleaned up the site and walked out. Then a guy came hurrying out and told me they wanted to see me in the office right now. Oh, yeah, here comes the bill. They offered me a job as a lathe operator, and wanted me to start in the AM for $7hr. I said, I have to unpack the car, etc, let me start Monday.
So that was my first job as a machinist.
