The Taig is more rigid than the old unimat SL, that's for sure.
If you have a Levin I wouldn't bother with a Taig unless you want
another lathe - you can do much more on the Levin (but there is a bit
of a price difference).

I have several bigger lathes but the Taig shines for certain work
because:
1) tooling is cheap and modifiable
2) Top speed is 5000 rpm, which is great for small parts
3) soft jaw 3 jaw chuck is great for certain operations
4) If I need to do something destructive (like grinding) on it,
replacement parts are cheap.

The Taig has shortcomings though:
1) No way to do single point threading (aftermarket accessories
partially answer this)
2) Lowest speed is 500 rpm, which is too fast for some work
3) Not a lot of space
4) Not as wide a range of accessories as other lathes.

But I am the #1 crazy Taig guy, if you haven't, check out my Taig
pages:
www.cartertools.com



On Fri, 08 Jul 2005 07:24:03 -0700, Eric R Snow
wrote:

Thanks for the reply DoN. I know a guy with a Unimat. I used it and it
was pretty flexible. As to collets, the collets for my Levin are not
the same as the ones the Taig watchmakers spindle uses. That's too bad
because then I'd already have 80 collets for the machine. I've looked
at the collets on the Taig web site. They don't have a large selection
but seem to stout enough. What in particular did you not like about
their collets? As to tapers, most of the tapers I do on small pins
would be short enough for the compound. I did think about a taper
attachment. Maybe there's a market for some.
Eric