This was bought for me as a gift for Christmas.
It was really easy to set up though the instructions were a bit unclear I was able to figure it out. It comes together about 90% already put together.
I then checked how the centers lined up and found them extremely accurate, so I was happy about that. No shimming or fiddling with it needed.
I got it set up pretty late in the day so the first thing I did was just rough in a dowel rod for fun.
The next morning, I got up and got a small 4" bowl blank centered in and went to work and I didn't even get the outside roughed before there was a pop and a bright flash from inside the control box and it wouldn't turn on again. I honestly thought I had blown a fuse. Long story short, I didn't. A week later waiting for more fuses and that not being the issue, I opened the control box to find that one of the circuits was split in half and the other was blown almost completely off the board. Also, the fuse was untouched.
That was Sunday, and on that same day I went to Wen website and submitted a Warranty Claim through their "Contact Us" link at the bottom. It stated I would get an e-mail and to provide attachments via the e-mail I have them everything the e-mail asked for then waited. It was Sunday, they don't work on Sunday... fair.
Monday came... and went.
Tuesday came... and almost went, but I tried to call support and got sent to voicemail without even getting to wait in a queue. This was near 3:30pm and their site states they are available till 5pm. Left a message and waited for a call back.
Wednesday came and I grew tired of waiting so I called at 8am when right when their support starts.
Gave the gentleman my information and Ticket number from the e-mail on Sunday. Confirmation was made, very few questions were asked and I was told that I would be getting a replacement Control Box.
This was about the only enjoyable part of the warranty process.
Had to wait till Saturday for the replacement. They did not expedite it or anything. Again, fair.
Though at this point I have now had a broken Lathe for 2 weeks.
The new control box comes with no instructions on how to replace it. Though it was packaged well.
The replacement looked exactly like the one that failed, so I could at least compare and contrast. Take pictures before dismantling etc. Getting the wires out of the old box was a huge pain and I ended up just deciding that breaking the case of the old box to get the wires out was the way to go. I then struggled a bit more getting them into the new one. Actually connecting the wires was easy though.
Finally, the lathe is working again.
First thing I did was plug it into a power monitor reader to measure amp draw while in use. Here are a bit of my findings for a circuit that uses a 10amp fuse
This draws about 1.5 amp at the lowest speed and no load. Nothing even in the lathe.
With no load and full speed it was about 2.4 Amps.
I then set up a camera to record while I work on the lathe. Don't want to be messing with it with my attention elsewhere.
Even while roughing out yet another bowl (cause if it was going to blow again I would rather have repeatable variables) I could not seem to get it to go above 3.5 amps. And I even stalled it a couple times by taking off to big of a bite at once several times.
Which... cool the label on the machine actually says it's a 3.2amp lathe. But here's what gets me. The calculation for a fuse roughly states that the fuse should be 1.25 to 1.5 times more than the maximum amp draw. So even at the rating it says it's fore would only require a 5 amp fuse (3.2*1.5=4.8 rounded up) 6 if you wanted I guess, but even still, the machine never seems to get anywhere near being able to blow the fuse yet it sure was capable of blowing the circuits off the board the first time around which my understanding is that the fuse is supposed to blow first.
Anywho... despite all this I now see that this item shows as "Discontinued" now so all of this is probably falling on deaf ears.
Now that my lathe is working and the headache appears to be over for now I can at least say I am enjoying my lathe. But if it fails again, I will likely be shopping elsewhere as I do not see that Wen has any other variable speed lathes in stock... and I just can't imagine fighting with adjusting a belt or only having 1 speed.
Conclusion - the Lathe machining seems spot on. The engineer/electrician that designed it skipped a few classes. The employees in Customer Support are pleasant to work with, but the software set up in order to get tickets to them is a joke.
Really the only thing that saved them from a 1 star review was the fact that I at least have a working lathe now.
| Manufacturer | WEN |
|---|---|
| Style | 2022 Model |
| Pattern | Lathe + Pen-Turning MT1 |
| Item Package Quantity | 1 |
