On Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:36:39 -0700, sam wrote:

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:18:47 -0700, "CW"
wrote:

I bought a jet mini about a year ago. Non variable speed. Cost about
$180.00. Variable speed is in no way necessary on a wood lathe. Also, the
variable speed lathes often are very lacking in torque at slow speeds.

That is the one that I was looking for, but it seems like it is no
longer available. It seems like it was replaced by an indexing model.
Which leads me to ask how useful is variable speed and indexing. I
have never used a lathe, but have done a lot of wood working.

I don't use indexing, but I can address VS a bit..

I tried the Jet mini in both flavors, and as a personal thing I didn't like the
VS..
Mainly because it's basically on a dimmer switch, as far as I'm concerned, and
had some spots at some speeds that seemed very lacking in torque..

I went with the non-vs version and love it.. I've moved up twice, to a 14" jet
with "Reeves type" VS pulleys and a 16" Nova with digital VS, but still use the
mini..

I must have abused that little thing on 300 turnings or more and never even
needed a belt replacement... the damn things just keeps humming along and is a
very good lathe..

As to vs/standard, I find that speed changes are not that often, and it just
takes a minute or so to change the belt position to change speeds..
Something that I really like about the Jet mini is that you can easily adjust
belt tension, which I couldn't do on my larger Jet with VS.. YMWV


mac

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