Both Rick and myself, plus a few others, have said a few times on here that if you can get single point threading under your belt, the world of model engineering opens its doors.
With just a couple of well ground tools, you can save yourself a fortune not having to buy expensive taps and dies. In fact you can make your own special taps and dies.
If you are afraid of running into the chuck, there have been a lot of designs over the years for an automatic carriage stop. Some of the bigger lathes have it built in by the manufacturers. These designs are usually very easy to make and fit, and usually consist of a few levers, a cam with pawl and a spring load to disengage the half nuts. I don't have a plan to hand, but I am sure that when I clean out my deep storage area, I should be able to find one.
Mike,
Does your machine have half nuts?
If it does, I would try to find thread indicator to fit your lathe. Or if not available maybe some of the whizkids we have on here now, can give some idea what the calculations are to make a basic one.
OK, you can do the job without one, but realistically, one is needed if you are going to be doing thread cutting in any quantity. OK to do manually, occasionally, for say a left hand metric on an imperial machine. But to do it all the time like that, you need to be a masochist, with a tendency for self flagellation.
John