As the title states I'm looking for advice about mill lathe combo machines. I only need something capable of making bits and pieces for motorcycles. I have experience with mills and lathes just not a combo machine. I have been having bad luck relying on machine shops for basic work and if its worth it I'd make the leap and purchase one. I'm looking at combo machines because I'm not in a shop environment and space is limited.

 

I don't like them. As a lathe they are fine, but as a milling machine they suck. The lathe part works fine, you can machine anything as you would with a regular lathe.

Now, the milling part depending on the model you get will have a few to a bunch of limitations. First. The column is not rigid enough. That limits how accurate the milling will be. You are going to have a lot of grief by having to cut tiny little bits at a time to avoid flexing of the column.
Second. room to work. If you are working on tiny stuff you might be OK, but the moment you need to work on something bigger you will run into the lathe chuck. So now you have to remove the chuck and it's a pain when you go to use the lathe again.

Third. you will have a very limited vertical travel, on most of them none. The head is stationary and you can't bring the bed up... you figure the rest.

There are more problems. It's a compromise and those rarely work well.
I have one of those mill/lathe combos and I threw away the milling part of it, it's out of my shop, I don't ever want to see that again.

I love the lathe part since I can turn up to 17" which is unheard of for a lathe that size.

 

Thanks for sharing your input! I was concerned mostly with vertical travel as none of the machines seem capible of achieving this and the idea of trying to work around the lathe seemed like it would be a pain. Easy to understand why I havn't seen one of the combo set ups in any shops.