Issue with my lathe, please help!!

[tim_peel]

I very recently purchased a shitty lathe from harbor freight. Its the 14" x 40" with the 7" disc sander. I am curious if I can put a drill chuck on this thing. It looks like the live center is not removable. Does anyone have one of these pieces of crap that can please give me some suggestions. I would have loved to have gotten something a little better, but this is all I could afford for now. Please help. Thank you.

[BigCasino]

in a review of the lathe on harbor freights website

This lathe does a good enough job with a few exceptions there is no morse taper at the headstock for one that means there is a lot of attachments you can't use the headstock also uses a odd thread size so if you want to use different heads you either buy one of harbor freights 2 styles or you buy an addaptor $$$

[tim_peel]

So should I take this one back and get the 5 speed with the MT? I really need to use the MT. lol I got excited about buying new tools and was trying to save some money and f'd up. Thanks

[dogcatcher]

Harbor Freight lathe number 34706 is a clone of the Jet 1236, it gets "decent" reviews on the woodturning sites. The best part if the crappy parts break you can buy the parts from Jet and up grade your lathe one piece at a time.

[sandahlpipe]

I have the Jet 12x20 and have yet to be limited by the lathe. It's as solid as a rock. There are some tools that you can save money on, but the lathe is at the heart of the pipe maker's tooling. Buy the best you can afford and you won't need to buy again.

I almost bought the same lathe, but then I saw the morse taper was absent from the tail stock and I passed. The other lathe you can get from harbor freight is workable from what I can tell, but it's only marginally cheaper than the Jet, so I just spent the extra few bucks and am very glad I did.