Mini lathe gear cutting setup - video

[Jon]

Mini lathe gear cutting setup. By Someone Should Make That. 13:14 video:

[dbat74]

Excellent job. More like this.

[Christophe Mineau]

Personally, I have given up using these small steppers for anything that needs to be reliable.
They are good actuators (made originally for air conditioning vents tilting), simple to use, but not accurate at all, and the gear reduction in it is quite fragile and has a lot of backlash.
So any incremental moves, involving moving forward and backward, leads you to uncontrolled location after a while.
For something that is used for milling like that, you also want to have the motor holding in position when not moving, that's not the case for this one.
I think it's better either to find a small reliable servo motor, or a small Nema stepper with appropriate driver and power supply, and possibly timing belt and pulleys.
I agree this is significantly more expensive, but when it comes to cutting gears, I think the cost will be covered by all the possible mistakes and wrong pieces and lost time you spend using a poorly chosen chip component.

[dbat74]

I like this mini lathe and I'm seeing in on a site for less then $50.00 and on Amazon for $500. What's your feelings on this lathe?