I've had mine ( #46 ) for a month or so now. Basically for the $ it's a good solid piece of iron. I ran a set of jam nuts with a fine 1" internal thread and the threading and tolerances were very consistent. I had to run off a few pieces for fixtures and the conversation mode makes this productive as long as the part geometry fits into the conversational set ( meaning forward facing features ). I had to make some one-off mandrils and spacers; I don't think it would have been faster on a manual lathe. There's an issues that you would have with any open loop machine:

If you need tight tolerances you need to re-check and tweak your tool offsets between power cycles. The tool gets it's zero references from micro switches which can be off from one reset to the next. I was using a boring bar up on the gang plate and external tool on the QCTP, so I found what worked was to cut a test piece with an arbitrary external and internal diameter, put some Dykem on them and touch tools off by jogging them in at .0001 steps with the jogging dial, then adjust the offsets in the tool table. This sounds a little overkill, but really just takes about 10 - 15 minutes. Once the tools are dialed in they are *very* accurate, but then I decided to spend the extra bucks and go with Dorian.

I got this machine because I know that Tormach will support it and bring some great solutions going forward.

My main complaint at this point is with SprutCAM8. There was no post processor that I know of for their lathe XZ. The sample I got from Tormach just isn't *there* yet. I have a software engineering background so last week I decided to use the Sprut post processor generation tool and get into it. It's *almost* working, but the problem is with SprutCAM. Clearly these guys are bunch of Russian math geniuses and have gotten all the heavy stuff ( 5 axis milling ) done, but poor old lathe XZ has some serious bugs - just look at the approach tool path of a drilling op. It looks like they haven't touched this code since whenever, so it makes for some very messy logic in the post processor to clean these things up. My $.02

@compunerdy: Thanks for the update on MDI memory! I was running out of scratch paper.