Roger, and everyone else, I am not saying your Rikon, or Woodcraft no-name, or Jet, etc. grinder is going to fail today or next week. My point is... WE get what we pay for. It's not about a singular machine failure. It's failure rate for a brand. It's "I bought it, it had problems out of the box so I returned it for a different machine of the same brand and this one seems okay". It's "I got 10 years out of the last $100 one before it died so I bought another one just like it."
I go back to my original posting, where turners that worked their way through their rookie seasons and became lifelong turners end up buying everything else of the highest quality they can somehow afford. Multi-thousand dollar lathes. Multi-thousand dollar band saws. Multi-hundred dollar individual turning tools. Tools and machines that will work without issue for years and decades. Until it comes to the grinder, arguably the single most important tool to the long life of your expensive turning tools, when WE compete to buy the lowest cost, lowest common denominator machines we can find. They have low quality motors, low quality bearings, low quality shafts, low quality castings (or worse, stampings). Then WE hand wring over which $150-200+ CBN wheels to put on them. It just defies logic. The lowly bench grinder, the red-headed step child of the turning shop.
I have no skin in this game, I am not in the machine tool industry. Buy what you'd like or can afford, but think about the long-term ramifications of your investment before handing over your cash. I'm a weekend warrior woodturner of over 25 years that holds every dollar I earn as precious. I'm still working for another 10-12 years, I started turning when I was young and poor but I knew the long-term value of stretching my budget to get the best machines that I could afford, not just machines that were affordable. I think of every power tool in my shop as a valuable investment worthy of my careful consideration and diligence, not as an after thought of, "ah, it should be good enough".
And a last thought that will strike a chord with a few of you- support one of the last American-made machine tool manufacturers for your craft. Stop supporting the low quality junk. Delta, Powermatic, and our northern neighbor's General are all dead wood machine manufacturers, nothing more than ghost labels with old names slapped onto low quality boat anchors. That was our fault, the consumer. Jet, Grizzly and Harbor Freight gave us half priced, quarter quality woodworking machines that we bought up in droves, and now our high quality, "lasts a lifetime" hometown machines are gone. Shame on us.
Buy once, buy right.
Steve.