A lathe is an awesome tool:
	It can remove everything that is not an engine
	From a block of steel.


Lathes are great. For a start, you can build a lathe without precision
machine tools - yet it is itself a precision machine tool, able to
make incredibly precisely-dimensioned objects.

Despite being quite simple (a means of supporting a piece of metal and
rotating it about an axis, while moving a tool along and perpendicular
to that axis), they can be used to do amazing things. Most people
think of using them to create objects of uniform rotational cross
section, like pots turned on a wheel, but they can be used to make
anything that more specialised machine tools can make; you can mount
your workpiece on the tool holder and fit a cutting heat to the lathe,
for example, and thereby cut slots in things.

And, with a simple mechanism to drive the motion of the tool from the
rotation of the workpiece, they can also put screw threads onto
internal or external surfaces.

Given a lathe, you can make anything - even if you need extra tools,
you can make them all on the lathe itself!