A lathe like he has cost about what I paid for my wife's ring long ago. In retrospect I should have bought more tools and made her a ring with them.
There is a HUGE impedance bump when talking about machinery like this with typical HN participants in that there is no/little evolution (aside from CNC) and depreciation is very slow, near zero. Its not impossible for depreciation rate to drop below inflation rate in some situations... Its not like video cards or CPUs at all. What I'm getting at is probably 95% of the money I've spent in computers since 1981 is in a dumpster right now, but roughly 95% of what I've spent on tools since then is still perfectly usable and in my basement. That, plus extensive trading up, is how old guys end up with amazing gear... no way they could afford to throw it all away and buy new every 5 years like computers, but they don't have to...