Really no way to justify owning a lathe and associated tooling -- but.  I got tired of having the local guy telling me that what I wanted to do would never work. When the American machine tool industry packed up and moved to China, there was some pretty decent new stuff that a guy could own. So my bull-headed streak kicked in and I bought some machines and kinda learned how to run them. To graduate from a grind stone, hand grinder, and file makes things so, so much easier and possible. Wish I would have had a lathe sooner but they were so expensive then so that delayed things.