The Myford has been the tool of choice for model engineers for the best part of 50 years now. New ones are very expensive. I acquired mine second hand from eBay at a much more reasonable price. It came with a large quantity of accessories and tooling, including an extended cross slide and a vertical slide, so that it can be set up for milling. It obviously pays to shop around. I would not say that there are bargains to be had, but there are some good offers at fair prices.
The serial number of the machine tells me that it is an early ML7. Information on that, and everything else you ever wanted to know about small machine tools, is available on
Tony Griffith's excellent site. In spite of its age, it was obviously well looked after, and I'm trying to treat it the same way. It is a real pleasure to use, and I am still finding new uses for it.
SInce the photograph was taken, I have obtained a quick-change toolpost, which has proved less useful that I expected! A QC toolpost is useful for doing repetitive tasks that require a small range of tools. The work I do is not very repetitive, and seems to require lots of different tools, so unless I go on to acquire a whole box full of toolholders, I remain destined to keep setting tools. I have also made a handle for hand-cranking the headstock spindle (very useful for threading with taps and dies) and one or two other little things I will get round to describing here eventually.