You should look into joining the Yahoo machinist groups. Believe it or not, the 7x12 group is probably one of the best ones and although the group is meant to help out owners of the 7x lathes, any questions should get answered by a knowledgeable group in short order (note: avoid the 7x10 group as that degenerated into a political discussion group a LOOOOONNNNNNG time ago).
Also check out Lindsay Publications for good books on how to run your lathe. The South Bend book "How to Run a Lathe" is good for an overview of how a metal lathe works and provides a good basic starter book. Home Shop Machinist and Machinist Workshop are two good magazines for gleaning metal working knowledge and finding project ideas and the main company for those magazine, Village Press, has a pretty good library of books that are collections of old articles from some of the main contributors from the past (like Frank McLean, Rudy Kouhoupt, etc.). There's also a British metalworking magazine that has been in consistant publication since the early 1900's called Model Engineer, while that magazine is quite a bit expensive, they do sell good books on how to use metalworking equipment, I believe there is one by Tubal Cain that is highly recommended for people new to metal lathes.
In short, you have started down another vortex that will suck you in and eat up your money.

I mean, a metal lathe is a good start, but you can REALLY get things done if you had a milling machine to go with it.
Edit: Forgot to mention, saw your lathe cabinet on the front page pics, VERY nice. Did you build it yourself? Was it re-purposed or did you build it specifically for the lathe?
Paul