Be a nice addition to your garage, one thing you can do to stop unsupervised or unauthorised people from using it is to put a keylock into the electrical circuit. That is a cheap piece of mind solution. Do as the others suggest take some time to go to community colledge to learn some turning skills,as they will teach you spindle speeds, set up and working centers, tool centers and counterbalancing. There are quite a few machining operations you can do on a lathe. Then there are all the accesories like 3 and 4 jaw chucks ceters and steadys. They get to be good fun to operate after a while. Oh and the big thing on the turning or any other engineering coarse for that matter is that they teach SAFETY.