About four years ago my brother called home from an auction looking for help hauling his treasures home, which included a 14x36 lathe and a mill/drill.    A lathe was something I had been wanting for some time, so it was a surprise to me. 

If it's round, you can build it with a lathe if you try hard enough.  The thing it is absolutely the best at is using up time. 

Perhaps the biggest takehome lesson I have learned from my experience as a totally unqualified machinist is that we have one machine shop about 25 miles away who is just too darn cheap.  They have good, big tools and good, big machinists who can turn out a piece which is an order of magnitude better then what I make, and they do it in a fraction of the time.   Everything I do, no matter how simple, takes at least twice as long as I think it is going to....I figure this out about the time I am too deeply invested in the project to forget about it.  If the job is very big and the wait time at their shop is anything reasonable I will endeavor to get someone on their way with the part and the description of what I need.  Having the ablilty is very worthwhile, however, because there are many cases where you can built the part and be back at work in the time you would spend hunting for who has the part in stock so that you can start driving after it....this especially applies on weekends and holidays.  The same can be said for the real machine shop, as long as they are open....they may or may not be cheaper then goign to whoever built the machine but they will very frequently be faster then waiting on a backorder.