I got a mini-lathe from Artec (a German brand), about 10-15 years ago. It is the generic lathe made by SIEG, but branded and sold by every man and his dog. it was the only machine tool I had as we had an inner city apartment, and the lathe in the corner of the balcony was the machine shop.
http://wrathall.com/Interests/machining/My_shed.htm I did a lot of modding on it. Starting with the typical little stuff like swarf guard on the apron gears, and adding a carriage lock.
http://wrathall.com/Interests/machining/Carriage_lock.htm Then on to some more extensive mods like the T-Slotted cross slide, which was very handy.
http://wrathall.com/Interests/machining/Carriage_lock.htmIt was quite quickly converted it to TurboCNC, which worked quite well. The canned cycles were really quite handy.
Since moving into a house with a basement machine shop, the 7x Minilathe has just lurked in the corner, except for being abused into turning wood on a couple of occasions.
I was never that happy with some of the harlf-arsed mods I did, and also got interested in doing a scraping project, so figured the little mini-lathe would be the perfect practice piece as it is nice and small and shouldnt take for ever.
Here is the first installment of the video log of re-modding it...
Mark