I suppose I have the best of both worlds, in that I have a Warco lathe with a milling head attached. The lathe can turn 9 inches, although at that size you get problems with the spindle motor power since the VFD cuts down the power when running at under 50% speed. I have fitted a set of six pulleys, so I can get down to 200 rpm at full motor speed.
The other drawback is that the milling head isn't really rigid enough for big milling jobs, but thanks to cnc, I can keep the cuts down to about 0.5mm (20thou) and it seems happy with that. If you are cnc, it doesn't matter how many cuts the machine takes. I had it chewing through 10 mm plate last week making some suspension parts for a train I am building. Each part took about 45 minutes - but I went off and had a cup of coffee. I had 16 to make, but I had them finished inside a week.
The lathe is simpler to set up. since it is not likely you will bother with homing switches. I do have one on the cross slide, because I have a centre drilling attachment on the cross-slide to take the place of the normal centre drill. I home the cross slide, and then put in the appropriate offset, and the drill comes across and centre drills the workpiece.
Other that that, work tends to be zeroed in the chuck. X is zeroed by taking a small cut off the workpiece and measuring the diameter of the bar . This is typed into the X DRO (or 1/2 the value if you are on radius). The Z is zero'd by takeing a facing cut across the workpiece and setting the DRO to 0. It is as simple as that.
In other words x0 is the centreline of the lathe, and z0 is the workpiece face.
Get going and get cutting - great fun.
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