I Bought the Cheapest 5C Collet Chuck on eBay: Is It Any Good?

i bought the cheapest 5c collet chuck available on ebay is it bad is it good can we make it work we're going to find out welcome back to cloud42 i'm james a couple of months ago i was browsing on ebay and i came across a 5c collet chuck for my lathe it peaked my interest for a couple of reasons first it came with a back plate for the one and three quarter eight spindle nose that i have on my lathe which is a little bit of a unicorn and second it was only 150 including the back plate with free shipping now to be clear i'm not expecting it to be good but how bad is it if you're as morbidly curious as i am let's go over to the bench and take a look well this is the chuck itself and uh you know on the surface it looks okay the ground surfaces look ground if i look at the register surface inside the end of the chuck here it looks pretty good it's just kind of rough bore down further in and if you look way down in there there's another ground register for the back side of the collet so it looks okay replaceable index pin and just a scroll it's like a scroll check it's not really a scroll but just use a key to tighten down and pull in the collet and you know all in all on the surface it looks okay uh the mechanism is a little bit scratchy oh where to put my chuck key i don't have it handy but spinning it seems a little bit scratchy so i thought yeah no problem it's probably just grinding dust in there i'll just take it apart and clean it out yeah that's not going to happen these screws i don't know how they were put in but i do not think they are ever coming out i'm not going to put a torch on this thing because i don't want to cook the lubricant or whatever's in there if i ultimately can't get it apart but i've even put a high quality allen wrench in there and pounded on it with a hammer with this held firmly in a wood vise and i cannot get those screws to even budge if i could get those screws to budge then the thing's probably just got a couple of spring pins for alignment and i could pull it apart but i have been completely unable to make it even move back yeah there's the spring pins right there so it's not coming apart anytime soon the thing that really is going to matter on this even with it a little scratchy i can live with that or i can figure out how to take it apart later the thing that really matters is we've got a face on the back that's going to register against the against the back plate and then we have a register in here that needs to be concentric and perpendicular to the ground surface at the front and the ground surface to register the uh the collet in the back and i don't really have a good way of measuring that without putting it on the lathe so i think what we're going to need to do is just machine the back plate and get this thing on the lathe this is the back plate now the back plate has been machined and in theory this can just screw the instruction stage just screw this right onto the spindle nose and then machine this side and the register and you'll be good to go except while this is the one and three quarter inch thread one one three quarter inch eight thread that's necessary for my spindle nose this inside register is too small so we're going to have to bore that out so i'm going to need to check this up in the lathe get it dialed in so that at least this surface is running true and the threads are running true so that i can then bore this out and have it be concentric with the threads indicating on threads is possible but difficult and so what i really need to figure out is how is this thing machined so that i know what surfaces i can trust now i think the whole thing was held in uh in a chuck in this way what would make sense to me is that they boarded out machined all of the surfaces on this side the register uh surface the out the the seating surface here and these surfaces on the outside and did the threads all in a single set up i don't know that for certain but i've taken some measurements to try to understand it the first thing i did is i've measured with a depth micrometer from this surface down to this surface and those seem to be parallel this surface and the surfaces on the other side are definitely not parallel so they were definitely done in a different setup and as far as i can tell from what i've seen again these two surfaces being the same or being parallel to one another it makes sense that the entire side here was done in one setup now they could just have totally screwed me on this by machining everything from this side except the threads which they machined after they flipped it around and didn't indicate it in well i mean look at the price it wasn't done carefully but the only thing that would make sense and the only thing that i could actually salvage this part easily would be if those threads were done in the same setup with all the features on this side so that's what we're going to go with we're going to indicate it in using the surfaces on this side and then i can check to make sure that the threads are concentric and if they are then we're good to go we can bore this out just touch all the surfaces on this side and then we'll be in a position to throw this on the spindle nose and do the rest now when i first started playing with this these surfaces were i was getting really strange and inconsistent measurements so on a hunch i took my precision flat ground stones here these ones are from kinetic precision and just dressed these surfaces and what i discovered is kind of interesting you can see three shiny spots one here one here and one here and what that tells me is that after this surface was machined it was then gripped in a three-jaw chuck and you probably can't see it but right next to those shiny spots there is a tiny flat spot on the surface here at least a place where the tool marks are just a little bit shinier because it's been grabbed and distorted and it was distorted enough to raise this material but once i came back through with the flat stone and dress that down until it stopped cutting i just had those three high spots this is now flat and if i take a depth micrometer on here this ends up being parallel to this and it looks nice and clean so i think the plan is going to be to check it up in the lathe in the four jaw chuck like this and then make sure we've got it concentric and then machine everything on this side let's go over to the lathe and get started okay i'm going to set this in the jaws but i'm going to leave it purposefully off of the steps here so that i can tap it in and get it running true later so i'll pull it off the back just a little bit just try to get a good grip here just enough grip that it won't go anywhere and yeah that's all over the place [Music] and let's bring in an indicator and see if we can get this thing dialed in [Music] so let's call it enough from that direction and let's start working on this direction [Music] uh okay we're pretty close there let's switch back to the face just see how we're doing here there we go that's a few tenths okay maybe about half a foul there now just as a sandy check let's check this register here or check the face there yeah that's basically not moving and then one more sanity check if we can come in at an angle and get on that inside register yep and that's basically not moving so i'm going to call that good okay we've got this uh chucked up and flat so all the surfaces are running true and i want to check and see if the threads are also running true so i've got my lathe set up for threading at eight threads per inch so as i turn this i've got the half nuts engaged so the carriage is moving back and forth at eight threads per inch i've got a dial test indicator here and i'm going to bring this in and try to get it where you can see it and we'll set this on the inside of the thread try to get that close to zero there and that's pretty rough so i can find a better surface there we go just that to zero or close to it and now let's just run this through there we go it's rough so we're bouncing around a little bit but i'm watching that not varying more than about a half a thou from the zero so i am convinced that we are running true on those threads as well so those threads definitely were machined on the same setup with all these back surfaces so we're all set up let's go in here and cut our bore okay the first thing i want to do is get set up to get that bore machined so i'll set up a boring bar here this back on feed make sure we don't have any ugly surprises and let's get set up for our depth first now i've got i've taken measurements off of another back plate that i have i know i want the bore diameter to be 1.813 inches sorry it's not metric dials on my machine are not metrics so this is what we've got 1.813 in diameter 0.55 inches deep and then this outside needs to be 2.635 inches so let's start by setting up this .55 so i'm going to run this down and just touch this outside surface and then grab a dial indicator now i bring that in to zero and we want to go 0.55 so one two three 4 5 50 right there and then now let me reset that on zero okay so we'll come in make one full revolution stop on zero and that will be our proper depth okay let's do a little bit of turning [Music] [Music] [Music] so i think i just took a skim off of the inside of the bore here and i know the board needs to go to 1.813 so let me just do a quick sandy check and just see where we actually are 1.769 and because i'm super paranoid i'm going to use a calculator so 1.813 minus 1.769 divided by 2 which means i got to pull out 22 thou on the cross slide so i am going to just do 5 and try to establish a good measure here and then we'll and then we'll actually start trying to hit our target [Music] take another measurement here there we go 1.13 and a couple of tenths okay i'm going to take that looking at what's in here and we need to do a little bit of cleanup on that thread now let's take some light passes and clean up the outside of this thing [Music] okay before i take this out of the check i want to just pop this off and try screwing it on so let's take the locking screws out [Music] oh go ahead and power down the lathe just to be sure and the moment of truth and there we go i'm going to call that a success let's take off the four jaw check here i think it's fine snug that back just make sure i'm not dropping all the weight at once and there we go now that we've got the backing plate alone just mounted here on the spindle we can spin it up and look at it and i don't know if you can see that but it is definitely running out on this side because this side is not parallel to the side we already machined so let me grab a tool and let's just start by skimming skimming all these surfaces and bringing them in true okay immediate problem it doesn't reach i'm going to take my shield off here ooh nice well the good news is it's oily and not rusty okay how far can we reach now not very far okay so we'll use the compound to get in there this should be enough now let's see if we can reach it all got a little bit more overhang than i like on the comp using the compound here but we can get to the point where we can skim the entire surface and it looks like we can should be fine just try to get this cleaned up there we go [Music] okay now see how much depth we have here i've wrote some measurements down we want this to be this step to be 150 thou so let's see where we are it doesn't have to be that precise we're at 136 [Laughter] [Music] so and i'm not measuring this precisely by any stretch 148 147 that will be just fine okay now let's clean up the outside of that register i'm just going to try to get it cleaned up to uh so that it's cleaned up all the way in and then we'll start measuring and figuring out what diameter it needs to be [Laughter] [Music] [Music] okay i know this register needs to be 3.739 i can't easily get a micrometer in here so we're just going to have to make it a caliper dimension it is 3.843 right now [Music] 3.738 that should give me one thou clearance let's see how it actually fits so i need to put a little chamfer on there first [Music] okay that is nice okay the outside diameter needs to come down but i think that register is going to be perfect so the outside diameter has to come down to 4.981 let's do that next you're here to bog down just as it hits but the reason for that is because i've got it on a relatively high speed belt but i've got it slowed way down with the vfd so the vfd hits a second and then then increases torque okay i think we're ready to mount this thing the fact that it'll stay on 150 register without falling off tells you something about how well it fits now these are the screws that came with it so if i were smart i would probably replace these with real alloy screws that i know the provenance of okay see how it spins okay we've got the thing on the back plate let's put something in a collet and see how it goes we've got a half inch collet here and this is just a cheap uh call it i don't even know what that brand is it came with a shars tool grinder and i've got a ground pin here and i've got a an edge technologies call a stop in here just for fun so i can just put that in and it will hit up against the collet stop let's find the pin here run this thing in put our pin in and see how close we get see how it runs there we go and [Applause] [Music] looks pretty good let's throw a dial indicator on that and see how close we actually are well i can't complain about that at all that is running about a half thousand let me bring the camera down so you can see that a little bit better that is running just about a half thou let's move out about an inch away and we're running maybe seven tenths eight tenths something like that that's not actually too bad do you want to try something let's try some so this um there are two pinions here this pinion is the one that's close this is the one i used this is the one that's close to the key screw for the collet let's loosen and re-tighten with this other pinion that's over by the oiler loosen that re-tighten there and let's see how that runs oh wow that's running out quite a bit more let me try to get this zero and see exactly where that is so that's about a thou and a half that that's running out if you tighten it with that one let me loosen and re-tighten with the one next to the key again and we're back down to under a half thou okay note to self always tighten using the pinion next to the key i gotta say half thou is way better than what i was expecting i was not expecting for 150 and then my machining skills on the back plate to get us anywhere close to that kind of run out that is significantly better than i was expecting for a hundred and fifty dollars so is this thing really great well this is no hard edge hlvh but you know that machine is just a joy to work with this is a cheap import lathe with a very cheap import collet closer but uh i'll take it in terms of uh just having work to do especially if i need to cut and trim pieces to length with the collet stop in there and get a bunch of them the same length that will be way easier than using my three jaw which incidentally doesn't run anywhere close to this kind of concentricity so uh we'll see how it goes in the long run we'll try out on some different projects and see how it works out but for a hundred and fifty dollars including the semi-machine backplate i cannot complain about that if you'd like to see another way to put a collet chuck on a small lathe check out blondie hacks today quinn has a new video showing how she put an er collet chuck on her lathe and i will put a link down in the description well that's all i've got for you today if you enjoyed this video please give me a thumbs up feel free to subscribe to the channel and leave me a comment you buy anything cheap like this on ebay did how'd it work out was it good was it bad were you able to fix it leave your comments down below and let us all know thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Clough42

Views: 123,885

Rating: 4.9272242 out of 5

Keywords: Lathe, 5C, Collet Chuck, Back Plate, Machining, Machine Shop, Machinist

Id: ZMLLaidoT1o

Length: 30min 41sec (1841 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2020