The common lathe has a wide range of machining objects, a wide range of spindle speed and feed adjustment, and can process the internal and external surfaces, end faces, and internal and external threads of workpieces. This kind of lathe is mainly manually operated by workers, with low production efficiency, and is suitable for single piece, small batch production and repair workshops.

A lathe is a machine tool that mainly uses turning tools to turn rotating workpieces. Lathe is the most important cutting machine tool in metal cutting machine tools. In general machine manufacturing plants, the number of lathes is the largest, also known as machine tools.