Vevor mini metal lathe review 7”x16”

Wrong tool, wrong height, wrong speed, not sitting on a solid surface, not bolted down, no tailstock used, and feeding backwards. This was like watching someone drive stick shift without ever having seen a car before. The fact that everything was so loose on the lathe makes me think this thing was abused during shipping because that is not normal. Unless you had already ran it for a while not bolted down, vibrating everything loose.

First time using a lathe?

Did you not see your insert shatter and loose it's tip on your first pass? Apparently not because you continued to try and cut....backwards direction ....with a 1/4 tool in a 1/2 holder. Scary bad. I would suggest watching a vid or two from Open Source Machine Tools lathe vids before turning your lathe on again. Seriously.

I have bought the exact same unit and had no problems. Out of the box! If you are going to set a tool you do it either on center height or below never above unless you are boring an inside diameter then the opposite is the case. This is extremely important as you want the cutting edge to make contact with the job and not just rub on a lower part. Being on center also makes sure it will cut the diameter you have applied to the hand wheel. I bought mine due to it having the largest bore through spindle that you can get in a mini lathe. It isn't a power house but with common sense it works just fine. If the unit isnt stopping the stop switch is wired incorrectly, it needs to stay on usually to remain open circuit so just use the E stop button as it will hold down the contact and make it go open circuit. If you must just use the stop button additional relays are needed in the control.

When I learned machining basics, on of my teachers said, when you don´t know what you are doing, you need the best equipment, experienced guys can better handle less good equipment and make it work - this video clearly shows he was right.

Someone does a lathe review. Same person also does a test-run with about 6 times diameter stickout and the cutting tool improperly shimmed. Lathe might be trash but at least try to handle it correctly.

Got mine just yesterday, very same model (MX-S716) First lathe experience in my life (I'm 66) although I like to fiddle with mechanics from time to time. So I spent half a day checking tutorials on YT, learned the basic controls, parts names and understood the weak spots of the machine, then spent half a day more adjusting play, tightening (or loosening in some cases) nuts and bolts and finishing with a good coat of lithium grease on slides, screw, gears, rack and pinion until all travels were smooth enough with the least possible amount of play. And then... time to make some shavings! Put a tool on, set the correct angle and height as seen in the tutorials, clamped on chuck a brass rod about the same size of that shown in the video, and.... got a mirror finish on first try, both shaft and face 😃 Then I stood for quite a while contemplating my debut feature, feeling its satisfying smoothness and pondering over the undeniable fact that you cannot expect to have such a complex tool working flawlessly right out of the box and that, especially when dealing with cheap chinese items, "no pain, no gain", but patience, curiosity and learning can prove rewarding in the end.

I assume you are a first time user and have understood by now what you did wrong? (center height, speed, feed direction, tooling, tailstock support). Poor lathe, poor ears, poor knowledge, poor review.. Although the play is quite large, it matters less than you think. Every lathe has play, and you just have to take that into account, regardless of the amount. Anyway, mini lathes as cheap as these need a lot of TLC but mostly will do the job afterwards. Yours is probably abused during shipping. Take some time to clean and adjust everything, and take more time to learn how to use a lathe.

I dont understand you guys complain about super cheap mini lathes. It has a reason why they are cheap. There are a lot of videos online saying that you have to improve them on your own. So did i. And i really have to say for that amount of money i’ve spent its a decent lathe.

9:30-11:10 was genuinely hard to watch. Holy shit

I bought one of their 7x14 models from Amazon and it showed up at my place completely demolished. No exaggeration: it was totally busted up and missing all of the peripheral parts like gears, belts, tools, etc. The busted up wooden crate should have been a dead give-away that the contents of that crate were in bad shape, but they sent it anyway. I contacted Amazon about it, and they sent someone out to pick it up and take it back. Three days later a brand-new replacement was delivered. The wooden crate of the replacement lathe looked a bit more pristine, so I had high hopes that the previous mini lathe was just an unfortunate mistake. When I opened up the crate of the brand-new replacement mini lathe, I found that it too had sustained enough damage to render it non-functional without replacing several major components. It took a little over two weeks for Vevor to send out the replacement parts I needed to install before this "Brand-New" mini lathe would function. I finally got all of the replacement parts installed and ready for its' maiden run. It looked and ran perfectly for about five minutes, then I started hearing some rattling coming from under the gear cover. That rattling turned into a loud clunking sound, so I quickly turned off the machine. I found that one of the little brass studs that hold the smaller 20-teeth gear had sheared off right at its' base. I'm now waiting for the replacement brass stud to be shipped to me. In the meantime, I've been able to modify the studs on which the 20 and 25 teeth gears rotate on by fabricating some replacements out of tool steel. I've modified those studs so as to be able to use bearings in place of the metal-to-metal fit that caused the brass components to shear off at the slightest amount of heat and pressure. The only reason I kept the second lathe they sent out was because they gave me a huge discount if I kept it. I got it running really well now. Right now I'm waiting for some extra gears to show up so I can cut some specific thread. This mini lathe is capable to cutting a fairly large range of imperial threads but the gears that came with it are not the correct ones to cut the thread pitches I'm needing. You're right when you state, "Don't Buy" these Vevor lathes. They can be more trouble than they're worth.

I don't think your tool height is correct.

I have the same one, it is what it is at that price point. But I love it and enjoy improving it and using it.

After watching many reviews I put off buying a mini for over 12mths but finally got 1. It has loose joints all over but I hadn't touched a lathe in over 30yrs so expect to learn a lot along the way. Saw many of the same issues as you but the VS not stopping is a concern, hopefully it's just a grub screw in the knob that needs tightening after you adjust to the 0 position.

I bought one of their 8.5" models. tail stock was .083" below the spindle, tail stock screw was bent, gear box was dry, handwheels broken.

My Vevor came without grub screws in the carriage slides. These allow you to tighten the mounting screws, and still maintain the adjustment. I ordered some from Little Machine Shop

I got a PM190-V. Same size, same box, double the price. There are differences: I can change speeds electronically and via pulley changes. My lead spindle is dust covered and the bed is ground and hardened in Germany. It also never goes completely to zero. I also have another motor in it. I figured in the end you pay either for those features upfront or by time modifying. I recommend a quick change toolpost. Align tool heigt with center of tail stock. Engage tailstock and bolt it down. Otherwise I would expect all what you mentioned and would see that as normal on a lathe. There is always some play. Anyhow I hope it will work in the end for you.

For those below with way more knowledge than i have, what do you recommend at roughly the same price point? Get an older Taige, Craftsmen etc and rebuild it?

Welcome to the pain of small lathes. I started out on a 6" Atlas that the previous owners obviously abused and it took a long time to get it into shape. A few things I would recommend is don't have that much stick out without tail support, feed towards the head if you can and use HSS on brass. HSS shears or slices if you will, Carbide works in a different way unless you are using inserts designed for Aluminum which are sharp on the edges like using HSS. Make a shear blade out of HSS, this will give you some really nice finishes on projects. Even the cheap HSS that you get from China or India will do very nice work if you shape it correctly, I have used just about every name brand out there and the cheap stuff holds an edge just about as well if used properly. M2 HSS will work fine with about anything a mini lathe can do, there is no need to get a higher grade like M35 or M42 which is much harder to form.

I have the Vevor 9x32 lathe and I can not recommend them. The stuff you describe is pretty standard for all mini lathes, you have to completely (and I mean COMPLETELY) disassemble everything then clean, lube, reassemble, tighten and adjust everything to specification. You will find metal shavings and dust in critical bearings that are contaminated and must be cleaned if you want your lathe to last a few years. It is pretty much the way it is even for import lathes that cost 5 times as much and are much bigger. However the reason I can not recommend Vevor is because my lathe came with critical errors in the machining of the lathe bed that make it inaccurate. The flat ways on the bed top and bottom are not parallel and as such the cross slide carriage can never be adjusted correctly to traverse the length of the bed ways. It is either too tight or too loose in one spot or another because of this. Another major inaccuracy is that there is sag in the main bed in the middle. A precision straight edge placed along the bed shows significant gap in the middle (probably 20 thou). This is verifiable with numerous straight edges so it is definitely the lathe. Luckily this is fixable with a thick steel plate for a table top underneath which I already have and have bolted it to and shimmed it to near enough tolerance. The bed ways out of parallel is correctable with machining the bottom surface to bring it parallel and that is progressing. It could be thought of as a toss up between buying an old used higher quality lathe that will need wear issues corrected or a new one that will need assembly issues corrected. Both will be considerable work to get accurate machining with long term reliability.