Colchester Bantam 2000 - Thoughts?

[Neale]

I know it's a difficult choice - I went through the same decision process a year or so back and went with the second-hand British option over the Warco same-price alternative. In your case, though, you are comparing two very different machines. The Warco is roughly equivalent to my Myford Super-7 which is a great machine, very useful, pretty versatile, etc. But next to a Bantam it's a bit of a lightweight. Less capacity, and that increased mass translates into greater cutting capacity (much faster metal removal, etc). As long as it's not too worn...

In my case, what swayed me was that the second-hand machine came with a heap of tooling, chucks, collets, etc, and the Warco with the bare minimum. You are going to have to buy cutting tools in either case but chucks can cost a fair bit, and from what I read the Bantam had a D1-3 spindle nose mount and these days that's not a common size. OTOH, I think the Warco has its own unique chuck mount which can be a bit fiddly to use when changing chucks.

Can you realistically think through the kind of jobs you might do on the machine and see if that guides you? Remember that you can do little jobs on a big machine but the opposite is more difficult...

And while the Bantam might be the right size machine for you, this particular Bantam might not be! There are plenty of them around (very common machine in training workshops and the like).