Years ago I went up to the Grizzly showroom with a piece of ground rod and a mag
base with DTI in hand. I chucked the ground rod in their drill presses (one at a
time) clamped the mag base to the table, and checked runout by hand with the
dial test indicator. In no case was the runout less than 1/32", in other words
awful. The manager saw what I was doing and came out. At first he thought I was
trying something funny but then he realized I knew what I was talking about,
then he watched and once he got it, he took me in the back and we spent about an
hour with one of their employees uncrating new drill presses and testing
runouts. They were *all* over 1/32" runout. They were most apologetic but said
after all, their primary target was woodworkers.

I didn't relieve their anxiety by telling them the error was almost certainly in
the cheap-ass chucks they used. Needless to say I left there without buying a
DP. I would have popped the chucks out an directly indicated the spindle but
they wouldn't let me, said that was disassembling the machine. Snicker.

Nice paint, though.

Grizzly has safety reading glasses for a reasonable price of $10:
http://www.grizzly.com/products/H7195

Grizzly is said to stock spare parts and to have good customer service.

GWE

Koz wrote:



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