Collet Chuck From eBay Parts!

sure do wish i had to call it chuck they're so expensive though i wonder hello internet my name is quinn and this is blondiax since around the neolithic era i've wanted to call it chuck really badly but i've never had the means to acquire one now there's this thing called electronic bay it's pretty new you probably haven't heard of it but i'm plugged into this kind of thing so allow me to explain on this ebay as we in the biz call it people sell all kinds of crap some of that crap comes straight from china and a lot of it is let's say call it chuck adjacent now a very generous viewer sent me a very nice package of these types of parts from ebay and i want to see if i can make a full-blown collet chuck out of it so let's go we're going to need some long steel for this so it's over to the junk annex i think this chunk of 12014 will get the job done here yeah it's looking good now i'm going to need to know how deep the spindle bore is on my lathe so using the highly precise machinist's tape measure here i can cut a chunk of this off and this will all make sense here in a moment but over to the horizontal bandsaw to get it down to a more manageable size and yahtzee right into the tripod this bar is going to be attached to my future collet chuck and it's going to be spinning very fast and i don't want to vibrate so i'm going to turn it between centers so i'm dialing it in in the four jaw and i'm going to face off the end i'll just deburr that and i'll punch a nice center in there with my trusty number two center drill and then i'll flip it around do the same thing on the other end now i can pull the four jaw chuck off clean out that bar make sure the taper is nice and clean get my live center in the headstock end there get the bar in there and we are ready to turn between centers so generous viewer sent me this kit the other day and you can get these on ebay straight from china they're pretty affordable and what it is is an er32 collet closer on a morse taper four and it's got a drawbar thread in the back so what it's really intended for is tool holding in morse taper mills however i have a morse taper for spindle in my lathe so i think we might be able to convert this into a collet chuck there's basically two kinds of collet chucks there's ones that go in the spindle bore on the lathe and then there's ones that sit out in front of the spindle bore the reason is simple if your collet has to go inside the spindle board then you're limited by the size of that bore as far as what kind of cults you can use so in a small lathe like this i've only got i think a one and an eighth inch bore in this lathe so five c collets which would be typical for a collet chuck are too big to go in there so pretty much any kind of in-bore collet chuck is going to be off the table unless you use very small collets like 3c collets or decal collets something like that now you can buy 5c collet chucks that are entirely self-contained out in front of the spindle nose and hold the collet out here and then you just have to make a backer plate to fit whatever the mounting system that your lathe uses so enter the er collet now these things come in a couple of different standard sizes this is an er 32 you might also see er 16s which are the really small ones or the er40s which are the larger ones and what's nice about these is that they are a lot shorter than 5c collets so you can have them held out here in front of the spindle nose and they're quite a bit more rigid and more precise because again they're closer to the nose on the lathe there's two other things that make er call it's really appealing for a collet chuck the first is that they are front closing so the collet is closed up by a nut that goes on the front and applies the force on this little taper here on the front of the collet most other types of collets such as the 5c have threads in the back and the collet is expected to be drawn into a taper to close it up and what that means is that you need some kind of a draw bar or a draw tube to close that collet you can't close it from the front you have to close it from the back and then the other big win for er collets is that they are a double split collet so you can see that there are split lines that start at each end and what that means is that the collet closes more or less parallel compared to a single split collet like the 5c where the jaws close with a single hinge point at the base what that means is that 5c collets are very very sensitive to the size of the work you have to be within just a few thousandths of the size of the collet in order to hold work properly if you try to over under stretch the collet then you're just pinching the work at the end the back end is unsupported and it becomes unstable and you damage the collet as well so er collets are a lot more forgiving for not having the exact size radius which is great for work holding in a collet chuck where you're not always going to have a very precise size now both these collets are through collets which means you can put work all the way through them which makes them good candidates for work holding contrast that with an r8 collet which is good for tool holding in the mill it has a drawbar thread in the back and thus you can't thread work all the way through the collet so you're limited in what you can hold by about this length here so enter our friend the ebay morse taper er collet closer this thing can go in my spindle and i can close an er collet in it from the front which again very handy and er collets very handy and i can use it as i think a makeshift collet chuck now the only issue really is that again this is intended for a mill not really for work holding so it has a drawbar thread in the back and it's intended to be pulled inwards with a drawbar just like on a mill compared to something like a 5c collet chuck which would use a draw tube that will take up some space in your spindle board but still allow you to pass work all the way through to the back wherever your closer is now you could potentially use this without a drawbar just using the friction of the taper i'm not crazy about that idea because if the machining forces get too high you could cause this taper to slip or even pop loose so i would rather not run it that way so i am going to make a draw bar that goes through the spindle bore and tightens on the back of the headstock that does mean of course i'll lose the ability to pass long work all the way through it but this thing is pretty long so i'll still get that much length out of it and for working on small parts which is mostly what i want this for i think that'll be fine and hey considering this cost a fraction of what a real collet chuck does i think it's worth a try by the way you may have noticed that for almost the same money as these parts you can also get full-blown 5c collet chucks on ebay direct from china are these things any good well as luck would have it my friend james over at cloud42 just bought one of these put it on his lathe and did a deep dive on it so go check out his video i'll put a link down in the description i'm making the drawbars you may have surmised so it's time to figure out what this thread is i can check the minimum diameter there which gives me a ballpark so we're somewhere in the 5 8 inch range here and i tried to get in there with my thread pitch gauge to try and figure it out but it was just too hard to see i couldn't tell what was going on in there so instead i got out some prussian blue and i smeared it around in there and then i stuck a piece of scrap in there and made an impression on the scrap and luckily this is a coarse enough thread that this gave me a sufficiently precise impression that i could measure it it's a little bit sloppy but it's close enough for this job unfortunately my cheap thread pitch gauge only goes down to 12 threads per inch and i could tell this was coarser than that so i had to go older school and i just measured a fixed length and counted the number of threads in that distance and luckily with a very coarse thread like this that's pretty easy to do and it seemed like it was 11 threads per inch so i did some googling and determined that yes 5 8 11 is quite a common drawbar thread in a morse taper 4. so that seems to be what i have all right let's make some chips on the drawbar turning between centers start with a light cut get the feel for things and oh my we are deep in chatter town so i did a few checks make sure everything is tight all the basic stuff everything looks good lighter cut still no good i can't even touch this part without it chattering i tried a bunch of different settings feeds and speeds the works checked everything is tight just could not prevent this chatter so it must be just the length of the bar so one old school trick you can do to absorb harmonics in a case like this is wrap some leather around the part and that did help i could do a couple of depth of cut before the chatter kicked in wasn't really good enough though so another old school trick you can wrap some lead around there that helped more that i could do about a five thousand depth of cut but still not good enough for what i want to do so it was time to get serious and i brought in the follow rest now this is not ideal because it means the follow rest is going to be riding on an unmachined surface so it's not going to be perfectly round but we'll give it a shot and see if it helps so i have the steady rest set a little bit looser than you would normally do because again the surface isn't totally round but this actually helped a lot so i was able to get a 10 hour depth of cut here and if you listen carefully you can actually hear the chatter start and then it gets killed again by the fall arrest and it starts and gets killed again so we're right on the edge here but the fall arrest is doing its job but we got a nice clean starting cut all the way down and then i went in as close to the lath dog there as i dared now this worked okay but i wasn't super happy with it so instead i brought in the steady rest and now i've got lots of rigidity i can take full depth cuts now the disadvantage to this is i have to work on the bar in sections i was hoping the follow rest would work because it meant i could do the whole bar in one setup so why turn this between centers you might be wondering well a lot of reasons first and foremost turning between centers is how you get maximum concentricity so for a shaft that's going to be spinning at high speed that's really advantageous when you turn between centers there's only two points that are referencing the shaft to the machine so it's how you get the most precision on the roundness of that final part second of all when turning between centers you can pull the part out and put it back and even reverse it end for end and never lose that concentricity again because you're only referencing it to the machine by those two points so all of those features make it a great candidate for this particular part next i'm going to cut the threads at this end the thread into the back of the collet closer so i'm going to reduce this diameter down to 5 8 because you recall i'm going to need a 5 8 11 thread on here then i'll put a generous chamfer on the end which looks nice and helps the thread start easily and i'm going to put a thread groove up at the base of the thread which give me a place to start with the thread cutting tool and also adds to the strength of that connection there because it gives it a round profile right in that groove there where there might be stress risers now i don't own a 5 8 11 die so i'm going to have to single point cut these threads which means a lot of change gear gymnastics because this is a low budget hobby lathe that does not have threading gears in the transmission so swap out for 11 threads per inch and i'm going to get my threading tool squared up with the fishtail here and we're ready to go i gotta say this setup is pretty fun i'm single point cutting a thread almost 20 inches away from the spindle i'm almost at the maximum length of my lathe bet here i've never cut a part this long before and it's uh yeah it's working really well so i'm pretty pleased with this and within a few thou of where the book says this thread depth should be so it's time to stop and do a test fit and it threads on there but it's a little snug and it gets tighter as it gets to the base so we're not quite there yet now before doing another cut i always like to do a little deburr on the crests of the thread the file is facing backwards because the lathe is running backwards because i'm threading away from the chuck but it's always a good idea to do that and check it again before doing a final pass just so you don't cut the threads too deep by accident one more spring pass without actually even dialing in any more depth and that threaded right on there perfectly so i'm very happy with that seats up firmly on the shoulder of that collet closer there i almost had to remove my tail stock to do these test fits without upsetting the setup but luckily there was just enough room and the steady rest holds it in place speaking of that steady rest i can now move it down and work on the next section here in the middle which just needs to be turned down to match the first part this is one of those things that when i was first learning machining i thought would be really difficult you know machining a second diameter to match one that you've already turned because you've gone and moved all the dials and everything's gonna be you know you'll never get it quite exactly where it was but actually that turns out to be pretty easy to do much easier than i thought if you turn the cross slide in back into that same number it'll be within a few tenths of where the previous cut was and usually that's enough to where you can't feel the transition or see it once it's cleaned up even and then you can always just polish the whole shaft at the end to even it out a little bit if you need to now before i work on the other end i want to do a test fit here in the spindle so i'm going to thread it into the back of the collet closer and this will allow me to take some measurements with the real deal before i proceed i don't have a drawing or anything for this i'm just making it up as i go along so i wonder if room for the wrench there on the end and that looks good so i can now come back in and set it up with the steady rest and everything on the other end unfortunately the lathe dog has to go where my threads were i didn't plan that part very well so i put some copper in there to protect the threads and i'm just not tightening it down too too hard and that worked fine so once again just starting by turning this end down to diameter i'm going to cut the threads on this end with a die but my shaft ended up quite a bit too long but i didn't want to cut it shorter and lose my original center because i want the whole shaft to be turned with that same pair of centers so i ended up just cutting the entire end of that shaft all the way down to 3 8. i chose 3 8 16 because that's the threads that are used on my strap clamp set for my mill and so that will allow me to use the same nuts and the same wrench on this tool okay 3 8 16 let's see one quarter 5 16 3 8 24 7 sixteenths half oh i went too far seven sixteen still three it's twenty four five sixteen so i went too far again uh three eighths wait how do i not have a die for one of the most common thread sizes standard imperial fist shake so i'm going to have to single point cut this thread because i apparently don't have one of the most common dies in america so here's what i'm going to do i'm going to put a groove at the end of the thread and this is going to do two things which i'll cover in a minute and then i'm also going to cut a round base groove just like i did at the other end now that groove on the end is going to give me a run out area for the threading tool and it's also going to end up being a small boss that i leave on the part and that's going to give me a place that i can hit this bar with a hammer to pop the collet chuck out without mushrooming the end of my thread and otherwise this is just a standard single point cutting routine just like it did on the other end i spared you all of the extra change gear swaps that i had to do to set this up there's a lot of change gear swapping but i gotta say i'm getting pretty good at that now well i didn't think that through very carefully did i i'm at what i think should be the final thread dimension and i have no way to test it with the nut because the nut won't fit over that shaft on the end i could turn that whole thing down but i figured you know what i'm pretty confident that i'm on dimension so i'm just gonna cut it off right here i didn't fancy my odds with a parting tool here so i just used a hacksaw got a board down there to protect the ways test fit with the nut and it doesn't fit because of course it doesn't so i can't turn it in this position because there's nothing holding it in against the center at the headstock end so i dismantled my turning between centers put the four jaw chuck back in dialed it in and i did all of that with extra tooling so that i didn't have to touch my thread cutting setup which was all still sitting on the carriage and then i could bring the carriage back in and really all it needed was a couple of spring passes and the nut fit on there great and then i could just face off my hammer and nub in there clean up the saw cut and i did end up actually putting a center in it again because i want to pull it back out and do a little polish on it so that center is kind of an evil center because it's not perfectly concentric with the original center that was used to turn the entire shaft so yeah 20 years from now future queen is going to find this try to use the centers again and wonder why it's not running true anyway a quick polish to take out the steady rest marks and even out a couple of those transitions and let's do a test fit here now and see how we're doing so there's the closure in one end just tap that in and i can thread the draw bar into the back and now i can take measurements for the cap that's going to go in the spindle bore on the end and allow me to tighten the nut against it which is then going to pull the collet taper inwards for this cap kind of a good news bad new situation good news i found a perfect sized piece of scrap to make this from bad news is it's the last of this really awful mild steel that i never am able to turn very well i've shown this on my channel lots of times it's terrible stuff so i got all the carbide and it's actually doing pretty well as long as i take a really aggressive feed with it which you know is what carbide generally wants if i try to take any kind of light cut finish goes to poop again and then when i come back in with a really heavy cut finish is great this is the catch 22 of carbide on hobby lathes you really can't push it hard enough to do what the carbide wants to do i mean my lathe is doing this but it's not happy about it it is making unhappy noises and then i can't take nice finishing cuts the finish goes to poop again and i'm not in deep enough to get to the chip breaker so the chips aren't breaking it's it's a whole thing so it's back to my high speed steel and cutting oil to put a little boss on the end here this is what's going to register inside the spindle bore now i can bore this thing out so i'm going to center drill it and i'll set up to drill here a pilot down the center just going to make sure i drill deep enough to get to the end of my part here this is a through hole this is where the threaded rod goes through and so i'll widen this up to one size below my reamer size this reamed dimension fits over that shoulder that i left behind the thread on the back end there i don't know if you noticed that but you can see how that fits in there now just like that should be a really close fit which it is it slips in but there's zero play in that so i'm really happy with that fit over to the tail stock now for one of my dirtiest tricks that i'm not proud of put a morse tape or two end mill holder in the tail stock put an end mill in there a two flute is a good choice and now i can make a nice flat bottomed hole that's going to be a good starting point for my boring operation the secret to this is low rpm and very slow feed give that end mill plenty of time to do what it's doing because it's not a drill it's really not designed to be plunged this way but if you go easy on it it does work and it leaves an almost flat bottomed hole end mills actually have a little bit of a reverse cone in them it's clearance for when you're end milling the way they're supposed to be used but it saved me a whole lot of boring time so now i can come back in with a boring bar and just open this up to final dimension it's nice to have that flat ish bottom in there as well because it makes it easier to get to your final dimension with the boring bar as opposed to a drill which leaves 118 degree cone in the bottom and then you have to clean out that cone before you can really get in with the boring bar to final dimension quick check with the bore gauge here because i should be close and yep we are close so i can do a finishing pass now with that boring bar and i think that should be it let's do a test fit here with the bar going in the correct direction this time and that slides in there really nice again no play so very happy with that fit everything's coming up milhouse on this project i'm ready to part this off now so i'm just lining up the edge of my parting tool with the scale there in the front edge of the part and then i got my long travel indicator that was a donation to the channel actually so that i can measure the 1.4 inches down that i need for the total length here and now i can go in with my parting blade this was a slow and steady parting operation this garbage steel does not like being parted so i had to go real easy lots and lots of fluid and eventually managed to get it done and sorry no yahtzee shot on that one because i actually cheated and finished with the hacksaw but then i faced it off and put a nice generous chamfer on there so that part is comfortable to hold and uh well looks nice so that should be it for this part let's do a little test fit here for realsies so that collar slips down over the shaft and it registers on the shoulder behind the thread but it doesn't sit down on the shoulder on the main part of the shaft there's a little gap in there and that's necessary because remember the drawbar is pulling the taper tight at the other end of the bore and then the cap sits on this end of the bore and then the drawbar squeezes the two ends together in between let's put it all together now so thread the drawbar into the collet closer i found it's easier actually to do this first then thread it through the spindle put the cap on the back there and then put the nut from my strap clamp set on there i actually needed to face a little more off of this cap i miscalculated there so there's a thread short there on the nut but that's okay i did fix that later and now i can tighten that down and spin it up and well seems okay but the real truth is in the indicators i'm going to get out the big guns for this one i got my 10th indicator here i'm gonna get a baseline on my spindle nose and we've got between two and three tenths here right on the nose so that'll give us a starting point now on the taper of the collet closer we're up to about half a thou there so we've lost a couple tenths but here on the taper where the collet sits this is what's really important and here we've got about six tenths five six tenths something like that so that's not too bad actually so i gotta call it in here and let's see what the work is actually gonna see i've got a gauge pin on here which is the straightest and most well made thing i own and here on the gauge pin we've got somewhere between seven or eight tenths so we lost another tenth or two in the collet itself this is actually not too bad for the price point of these parts okay blah blah blah does it make chips let's find out here's some brass nice light cut first chips on this tool and seems to be working great let's do a big girl pass yeah look at that that's a hundred thousand brass no chatter no trouble at all that's working really really well so it's certainly not short of rigidity that's good to know all right but brass is easy mode let's try some tool steel this is one drill rod a light pass is going just fine so i worked my way up gently here because this is tool steel and i was able to work my way up to a 50 thou pass which is actually pretty good for this lathe on tool steel that's about as much as i do in my regular chucks anyway so i'm certainly happy with the rigidity of this thing we have one last little quality of life problem i need a way to immobilize this thing so that i can break the drawbar nut loose and so i need a spanner wrench of some sort my mill one doesn't fit unfortunately i couldn't be that lucky and it didn't come with one so i used my mill wrench as a starting point i traced it onto some hot rolled steel plate here and i just shrank the size of the opening there a little bit as i traced it so i roughed it out with an angle grinder because none of my little band saws are really up to this job i cleaned up all the edges on the mill and then i used the mill to just kind of freehand close to the scribe line there on the inside then i finished that out with some filing unfortunately that scrap i used had a grinder nick in it in a really unfortunate place and i didn't notice it until it was too late so i just welded that up and then ground that flat just so that that doesn't someday crack it's kind of in a critical spot right there and just because i can i hit the whole thing on the scotch brite wheel i dub the sparkle spanner all right one more final assembly because it's fun thread the draw bar into the collet closer thread that assembly through the spindle bore put the spindle bore cap on the end there and then put the nut from my strap clamp set on there and then a wrench on that nut and sparkle spanner on the collet closer tighten that up and we are ready to turn some parts in my homebrew collet chuck and then when all is done i just tap the nub in there on the end with my copper hammer pop that out unthread the drawbar store that in a violin case and it's ready for use next time oh and uh that mild garbage steel yeah so long that's the last of it there it is my homebrew collet chuck cobbled together from ebay parts for finish i decided to leave everything bright i just hit it all with some bow shield t9 corrosion inhibitor so it'll stay nice and shiny i think you should try making one of these too if you're looking for a really low budget collet chuck solution for your hobby lathe this worked out really well i'm going to have a lot of fun using this watch for it in future projects on my channel thank you very much for watching if you enjoy my videos consider me throwing me some love on patreon and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 246,937

Rating: 4.9320436 out of 5

Keywords: blondihacks, machining, machinist, abom79, this old tony, vintage machinery, steam, electronics, making, maker, hacking, hacker, lathe, mill, woodworking, workshop, shop, model engineering, engineer, engineering, live steam, machine shop, metal lathe, vertical mill, metalworking, metal shop, diy, home improvement, how to, do it yourself, do it yourself (hobby), ASMR, mini mill, mini lathe, tutorial, collet chuck, er collet, collet chuck lathe, collet chuck mini lathe, collet chuck animation

Id: Nz83tCAK_aI

Length: 25min 54sec (1554 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2020