In case anyone is interested, here's MHO of my new lathe..

The jet mini died last week and since it was going to be in the shop a while, I
started shopping for lathes... kind of settled on the 14" Delta for $650..

My wife got involved and asked if it was the only 14" that looked good... I told
her that the Jet was the other one that I had considered, but that I couldn't
see what made the Jet worth $200 more..

She got on the web and researched... and did something that I do for small
electronics and should have done... READ THE REVIEWS.. (yep, she's way smarter
than I am)

The Delta reviews were mostly bad, involving bent pulleys, hand wheels coming
off, bearings seizing, etc... (my dealer says that theses problems have all been
corrected)

The Jet reviews were amazingly good.. like they were aid ads... folks loved
them, have little or no problems, and very few complaints... the wife said
"spend the extra $200 and get the one that has the good reviews"... "yes, mam!

The price out the door was $917, which includes the legs... the lathe is 200
pounds, the legs another 160+, so eat your wheaties before unloading it....
I bought their floor model, being impatient and not wanting to wait for one to
come in, so it came fully assembled... they put it on my truck with a fork lift,
of course..
Got home and took the head and tail stock off, as well as the tool rest... that
lightened it up quite a bit...
Got my wife and 2 neighbors to help get the beast off the truck and set up.. it
takes up a LOT more of the gra.. shop that the mini did!! (about 3 1/2' longer)

The alignment after putting the head and tail stock back on was as close to
perfect as I would hope for: I swiveled the head stock around a bit and then
locked it on the detent, slit the tail stock over and they matched up like it
had never been swiveled..

The lathe seems powerful after the mini, and the 12" tool rest is way big for
bowls... gotta get a new set of rests, since the post is bigger on the 1442..
It walked around when I put an out of balance log on it for a test... but only
in a straight line, following the slope of the garage floor... a shelf with a
couple of hundred pounds of logs made it walk less..

Variable speed is handy... the control is sort of in the way at times, but no
setup is perfect..

Spindle Lock.. WONFERFUL! Why doesn't the mini have one?

Motor and pulleys are very quiet.. maybe twice the sound level of the mini and
still quiet enough for me to forget it's running and walk away from it..

I like the power switch on the head stock, as opposed to the tail stock end as
on the mini.. maybe it just makes sense to have it there, or it's my 20+ years
on a shopsmith, but I naturally reach towards a motor when reaching for a
switch..

2 minor complaints:

As mentioned here a while ago, the motor is mounted in a very strange place,
next to the head stock with the fan end in the perfect position to suck in
shavings and sanding dust, and sticking out almost as far as a face plate
would... weird...

It's nice to have VS, a spindle lock and a swiveling head stock, but when you
put the controls for these, plus the power switch, it gets pretty crowded in a 9
or 10" square area... the power switch can be hard to find in a hurry when the
speed handle is in one of the slower positions... not a good safety feature in
MHO..
Note: Being left handed and finding the controls crowded, they must really be
fun for right handers...

Over all, it's a lot of lathe for the money and is probably the largest that a
home hobby-type would get, considering the prices.. going to 16" adds $1,000 to
the tag..

Oh.. it also has a bunch of indexing holes on the spindle... I haven't got a
clue what they're for and the manual doesn't say, so the indexing screw is in my
face plate drawer, but this might be a feature that folks look for..



mac

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