That $200 quick change tool post I bought was a complete waste of money

I picked up a fancy quick change tool post off Amazon about 6 months ago for my lathe. It seemed like a good deal at $200 compared to the name brand ones. After a week of use the tool holder started slipping and I couldn't hold tight tolerances anymore. I ended up buying a used Aloris from a guy in Cleveland for $150 and it works perfectly. Has anyone else had bad luck with those cheap Chinese tool posts on a manual lathe?

3 comments

3 Comments

milaprice23d ago

I get where you're coming from, but I had the opposite experience with mine. That $200 one from Amazon you're talking about, I think it depends on which brand you get. I bought a Phase II for 180 bucks three years ago and it's still dead on, no slipping at all. Maybe you just got a lemon or weren't cranking down the locking lever hard enough. Not all of them are junk, you just gotta watch out for the ones with pot metal parts.

norag6623d ago

Man, that's rough to hear. I've been there with buying something that looked good online and it just didn't hold up. I had a similar thing happen with a vise from a big box store a few years back - the cast iron cracked on the second real use, and I was just furious. It really makes you wonder how some companies even sell this stuff when it's clearly not tested.

rowanellis15d agoMost Upvoted

You know what, I actually used to think it was mostly user error too, like people just weren't tightening things right. But hearing your vise story and my own experience with that digital caliper that was off by a full millimeter out of the box... yeah, some of this stuff is just straight up defective.