Paul in Redland wrote:

I'm considering a new drillpress and an engine lathe. I ran across Grizzly
Tools site, but I don't know anything about their products. I don't do
production work, just a home backyard workshop. What are your opinions of
Grizzly, both the company and their products?
TIA
Paul




I was up in the Grizzly main store in Bellingham, WA about a week ago
looking at lathes and drill presses. As someone else said, in general
you should assume the machine needs to be "touched up" as it comes out
of the box rather than ready to go. It will probably work ok after a
simple cleaning but it would be far better to assume you need to put a
good 40 hours into most machines to make sure alignment is improved and
that potential crap like casting sand isn't in the works.

I did notice one thing about their larger lathes. The overall quality
of the castings appears to have become a little worse over the years.
There is a bit more flash on the castings and they seem a little
rougher than they used to be. I assume that the "works" you can't see
are also a bit more cheaply made.

On their larger lathes, they tend to offer a basic as well as a "Z"
series or something marked "toolroom" or similar. The floor models
appeared to be differrent enough and improved enough on these models to
make them worth the extra money if you can afford the difference. The
difference is probably a Tawianese factory instead of a Chinese factory
version.

Grizzly does tend to back up their stuff reasonably for a vendor of
Chinese import stuff and also tends (according to rumor) to have parts
available long after the other guys have moved on to other models. Jet
is rumored to back up their stuff fairly well also but seem to build a
wall between the buyer and company (called the vendor) that may make it
harder to resolve problems.

As long as you know you are buying cheap machines and you get what you
pay for, I would have no hesitation in buying from them.

Koz