Wood Lathes for Sale

I've been looking to buy a wood lathe for a month or so but I'm having a tough time deciding on what model to choose, and more importantly where to buy one. I've been looking online mostly comparing reviews and retailers.

Amazon.com seems to have a lot of good lathes available and the prices are very good compared to most of the stores around here. There is the issue of shipping costs, which i figure will be a lot for a lathe since they can weigh a lot, but that's a consideration for the future.

The websites for individual companies like Jet, PSI, Grizzly etc. are ok, but obviously kind of biased, and it's pretty tough to find good in depth reviews. This page lists a bunch of wood lathes for sale and I thought it was very good, they have a lot of popular models and some pretty good reviews, but I still haven't decided what I should do.

I'm probably going to end up buying a mini lathe since I'm mostly interested in small projects like pen turning and maybe some bowls, and also my shop doesn't have a lot of room for a big lathe. The extra flexibility of a larger tool would be nice but I really don't think I can justify the cost right now.

The thing I hate most about shopping for tools is going into stores, the people that serve are all inevitably sleezes that just want to hawk an expensive product on you to get a big commission or else teenagers that don't know anything and don't care about helping you. That's why I'm mostly looking online, because at least you can always look at the specs of the lathe and what other reviews are saying.

So far the top contender is the Jet 1014i, it seems like a good compromise between quality and price. It's not too expensive, but not so cheap that I would worry about it coming broken right out of the box, and all the reviews are very good. I'm also looking at a cheaper PSI model, and thinking of it more as a starter lathe that I would have to upgrade in a year or two. Lots of tough decisions.

The only thing I don't like about shopping online is that you can't get a good feel for the lathe, how it handles, whether the workmanship looks good etc. I'm thinking about going to stores to try them out and then making my final purchase online, but that just seems wrong for some reason. Oh well!