Not Really Keyless

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How would you compare them to ball bearing Jacobs chucks?

I don't know. Send me one and I'll let you know.

On Thu, 17 Feb 2022 13:52:54 -0700, Bob La Londe snipped-for-privacy@none.com wrote as underneath :

Had poor experience with keyless especially where there is heavy vibration, as a result I can never ever trust them, Jacobs or any other! Just impossible to judge how hard tight they are without a proper mechanical key. C+

Seriously though I don't know. I have a couple Jacobs chucks, but no high dollar ball bearing chucks. The Jacobs feel nice, but other than being a little cleaner built than "some" of the import chucks I have they are not inherently better by design.

Well, I have some experience here, albeit from a pure hobby perspective. I started out with basic chucks, Jacobs and others. They worked ok, but some times slipped no matter how hard I cranked that key. When I bought some auction lots I was delighted to find a Albrecht keyless chuck. So I put it to work. It was great on small drills, but anything bigger than 1/4" would self-tighten. I mostly went back to the older plain chucks. Then I got a couple of Jacobs Ball-Bearing Super Chucks - 14N, 18N. Those work like a champ. They tighten down hard with normal hand-torque, and realize with ease. Never had a slippage.

So right now I have Super Chucks on all my machines. I have three Albrechts rolling around in the tool cabinet. I think I have a Jacobs keyless also. Looks nice, but I haven't spent any time testing it.

Well, I have some experience here, albeit from a pure hobby perspective. I started out with basic chucks, Jacobs and others. They worked ok, but some times slipped no matter how hard I cranked that key. When I bought some auction lots I was delighted to find a Albrecht keyless chuck. So I put it to work. It was great on small drills, but anything bigger than 1/4" would self-tighten. I mostly went back to the older plain chucks. Then I got a couple of Jacobs Ball-Bearing Super Chucks - 14N, 18N. Those work like a champ. They tighten down hard with normal hand-torque, and realize with ease. Never had a slippage.

So right now I have Super Chucks on all my machines. I have three Albrechts rolling around in the tool cabinet. I think I have a Jacobs keyless also. Looks nice, but I haven't spent any time testing it.

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Thanks.

My machines are too "experienced" to run exactly true but I've seen the same holding performance with Jacobs plain and ball-bearing and Albrecht and other keyless chucks. I have 8-1/2N, 11N and 14N Super Chucks for the mill and use the others on the less well centered lathe. I reamed their tapered spindle bores only enough to remove dings and improve the grip, and didn't risk making them less instead of more centered.

I had a problem with larger bits slipping in their crimped-on hex shanks so I tried machining the 1/4" hex on spare round shank drill bits. They cut easily with HSS lathe bits and end mills.

When working on a ladder hex shank bits are less liable to be dropped into the grass or bushes. I usually climb with both hands free and then haul my tools up in a bucket, in which small loose items are hard to find under the larger stuff. HF sells a 1/16" - 1/2" hex shank drill set in a clearly labeled case. Even if the bits are junk I would have bought it for the case, which I hadn't found elsewhere.

I used bucket bag organizers for a couple decades as an installer/contractor. I kept a clip on drill holster and mini clip on tool pouch in the bucket bag. It didn't always save me from having to run up and down the ladder, but it saved me thousands of trips back to the truck. As an installer I twisted off more drills than I had slip. Always carried Makita and Milwaukee drill motors and rotary hammers. (hammer drills too) Its a little annoying when I have to go back to the truck for another 6 foot installer bit because they last one caught a nail in a firebreak and its now stuck permanently inside the wall twisted off just short enough I can't get the drill chuck back on it. I hardly ever hauled the whole bucket up the ladder for regular work. Of course doing work on the roof I hauled lots of things up. I love parapet walls for hiding conduit.

I used bucket bag organizers for a couple decades as an installer/contractor. I kept a clip on drill holster and mini clip on tool pouch in the bucket bag. It didn't always save me from having to run up and down the ladder, but it saved me thousands of trips back to the truck. As an installer I twisted off more drills than I had slip. Always carried Makita and Milwaukee drill motors and rotary hammers. (hammer drills too) Its a little annoying when I have to go back to the truck for another 6 foot installer bit because they last one caught a nail in a firebreak and its now stuck permanently inside the wall twisted off just short enough I can't get the drill chuck back on it. I hardly ever hauled the whole bucket up the ladder for regular work. Of course doing work on the roof I hauled lots of things up. I love parapet walls for hiding conduit.

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If I did the same job repeatedly I'd have it sorted out and know which of my many tool belts and pouch bags to use, but each problem is new or a better way to solve an old one. My last ladder job was installing gutters for an elderly neighbor, using a mix of unmatched parts that were all we could find at HD, Lowe's and the local hardware store. We had to figure out something different at each step and I kept going back home for another tool.

More and more I like Japanese-style pull saws to make precise cuts freehand, the PVC gutter sections for instance. The Marples is my favorite.

"Power Source Ac/dc"

Fortunately I kept a well stocked service truck. For service and repair work I rarely had to go back to the office for parts or tools. For new installations since I was the one who sold tthe job I pretty much always had all the materials on hand before I started. Home Depot is not a real hardware store. Lowes tends to be slightly worse. Unfortunately there don't seem to be any real hardware stores left around here. A few independent franchise stores are left, but they look more like miniature home improvement stores than real hardware stores these days.

Usually for service work I would think about the job on the way, by the time I got there I knew what tools and materials to load the bucket with besides the standard stuff that never came out of the bucket.

Fortunately I kept a well stocked service truck. For service and repair work I rarely had to go back to the office for parts or tools. For new installations since I was the one who sold tthe job I pretty much always had all the materials on hand before I started. Home Depot is not a real hardware store. Lowes tends to be slightly worse. Unfortunately there don't seem to be any real hardware stores left around here. A few independent franchise stores are left, but they look more like miniature home improvement stores than real hardware stores these days.

Usually for service work I would think about the job on the way, by the time I got there I knew what tools and materials to load the bucket with besides the standard stuff that never came out of the bucket.

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I was never fortunate enough to work for someone as well organized as you. Often I was sent out blind, on the assumption I'd figure out the problem and a solution when I got there. When my neighbor has a problem I can't fix, like his cable or gas heat, the service man is usually sent out that way too.

I wish I had a photo of me in my wizard costume repairing a 2-way radio in the medieval setting of a Renaissance fair.

LOL.

Well, as an owner/tech I was very conscious of the fact that time is money. Not so much for T&M trouble shooting (sometimes), but big time on new installs. At one time I was doing all the communication cabling for a school district. I would bid a job based on how long I felt it would take the average technician to do the job. Then I would think ahead and try to figure out how to work smarter. Things like pull huge network bundles all at once, and just not worry about wasted wire. Then split the bundles and cut off more than needed reach the destination at branch points. I might throw away several thousand feet of wire on a modestly large job, and I would save thousands of dollars worth of time. I didn't do "rushed" work either. Every year up until the forced bid level all got all their work. They wanted me to do it all because they just didn't have problems with it. There were days when I was making making 500-800 an hour. Of course being self employed there were days when I was losing money per hour too.

It used to drive me bonkers that guys working for me couldn't grasp that they should be thinking about my jobs while driving to the job. If I am paying for their time they should be thinking about my jobs. Not sending coded love notes back and forth on their pagers or rocking out mindlessly to the truck radio.

A few got it. Back when I was doing a huge volume of TVRO work I wrote our installation manual and a trouble shooting guide because the provider's manuals were crap. I had one guy who did trouble calls besides myself. We were so efficient at it that we were doing the service calls for all the different installing companies. My guy cleared 50% of the service calls on the phone. This was for customers that the service provider was not able to talk through on the phone. We got paid a minimum flat rate plus mileage and extras for clearing service tickets. He made me some serious money. The provider got mad at us and wanted to cut the rate if we didn't go to the site. I said, "Ok let your phone support people clear those tickets then. I've got a top guy and he deserves to be paid for it." A few years later I found out the provider had managed to steal one of my manuals and they were giving copies of it to their own people. LOL.

Anyway, time is money.

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Speaking of which, do you make molds for rubber or plastic antique car or machinery restoration parts, like electrical insulators or hydraulic seals?

The only such mold I've made was for the rubber hammer button on a Teletype.

I discovered when rebuilding some leaky porta power clone cylinders that the seals were non-cataloged specials, which I was told is the norm for Asian imports. I was able to modify the pistons to accept standard sized seals.

Loving your chat, Jim and Bob. From here at "Leigh Quay Boat Services". Never got anywhere near that level of organisation when working on the "GSVenus".

Loving your chat, Jim and Bob. From here at "Leigh Quay Boat Services". Never got anywhere near that level of organisation when working on the "GSVenus".

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I've rarely seen effective organization. More often the place was run like an art colony, everyone doing their own thing with minimal interference. For engineers that's paradise but it's not a good omen for the company's survival.

I think the best managers I've seen were theatre directors whose task is to coax maximum effort from their tiring actors for 12-14 hours a day. After the set I built was in place on stage I'd sit with them to watch for and correct problems, and observe their methods.

The musical "A Chorus Line" demonstrates this, with the director being tactful and persuasive and his assistant being very strict and demanding, the Good Cop/Bad Cop approach. In "42nd Street" the director takes both approaches as needed. Your 2019 British film of it with Tom Lister, Clare Halse and Emma Caffrey is excellent.

Dean Kamen had an arrangement with Segway to not steal their employees to Deka, so I was disqualified from working for him.

There are a fair number of urethane and silicone rubber and hard "casting" resins that may be a better choice for one off or very small production of various replacement parts than having a custom mold made one off. They can't replace all commercial parts, but they can handle many. The key (and often the hard part) to making cast molds to make cast parts is often the need for a quality master to start from. I have done a little of that kind of work, but its not really in my commercial skills.

Primarily I machine aluminum low pressure injection molds and casting molds for soft plastic fishing lures and cast lead fishing lures. I've done a few high pressure embossing dies in medium hard steels, and recently I picked up a customer who does small production run hard plastic (polypropylene) injection for toys and toy accessories. I've done some molds that were used for silicone injection, but I'm not familiar with the exact process the customer used for their parts.

Since picking up the toy mold jobs I've started working on hard plastic injection molds for two part hard fishing lures using ABS and polycarbonate. I've got a tiny lever operated injection machine (1.1 cubic inches), but I suspect I'll need something with a little more tonnage for the surface area of some parts I want to make.

I could maybe help with some of your problems, but the cost would probably be out of your budget. You might want to atleast learn something of making molds and parts from fluid resins and fluid media before deciding if its worth hiring out the kind of work I do. One of the big issues here is viscosity and trapped air. Also, working time can be quite short. There are generally two ways people deal with trapped air. Pressure and vacuum. The most common thing used by garage shop guys is a pressure or vacuum pot about the size of a large paint bucket. Pressure seems to be favored by some because vacuum can be quite messy as the air bubbles out of your resin.

There are a number of videos on YouTube of people making parts this way. Many are hack jobs, but you can still learn from them. The guy with the talking sock puppet annoys the heck out of me, but he has spent some time doing this sort of part making. I seem to recall that you do not have high speed Internet. Your local public library may have a computer area you can use, or you can take your laptop (if it has appropriate security software installed) over to a coffee shop during one of their slower times of day. After you have a firm grasp of basic processes then its time to contact some manufacturers and see about product properties for your application.

If you have a parts that "needs" to be a heat vulcanized rubber then its probably out of the reach of basic garage shop work. I think other resins will fill most needs though.

There is some value in letting engineers run wild. While I despise Goggle's meddling in politics and social engineering they did a lot of exactly that. Let groups run wild with pet projects. Then when there was something there they reined it in, cleaned it up, and monetized it. Sketchup, Google documents (cloud services), YouTube, etc etc etc....

Kind of like breeding horses. Isolate separate groups with desirable traits and inbreed them. Dispose of the ones that have flipper hooves and a fifth leg growing out of their forehead, and cross breed the rest with those with desirable traits from another group.

There are a fair number of urethane and silicone rubber and hard "casting" resins that may be a better choice for one off or very small production of various replacement parts than having a custom mold made one off. They can't replace all commercial parts, but they can handle many. The key (and often the hard part) to making cast molds to make cast parts is often the need for a quality master to start from. I have done a little of that kind of work, but its not really in my commercial skills.

Primarily I machine aluminum low pressure injection molds and casting molds for soft plastic fishing lures and cast lead fishing lures. I've done a few high pressure embossing dies in medium hard steels, and recently I picked up a customer who does small production run hard plastic (polypropylene) injection for toys and toy accessories. I've done some molds that were used for silicone injection, but I'm not familiar with the exact process the customer used for their parts.

Since picking up the toy mold jobs I've started working on hard plastic injection molds for two part hard fishing lures using ABS and polycarbonate. I've got a tiny lever operated injection machine (1.1 cubic inches), but I suspect I'll need something with a little more tonnage for the surface area of some parts I want to make.

I could maybe help with some of your problems, but the cost would probably be out of your budget. You might want to atleast learn something of making molds and parts from fluid resins and fluid media before deciding if its worth hiring out the kind of work I do. One of the big issues here is viscosity and trapped air. Also, working time can be quite short. There are generally two ways people deal with trapped air. Pressure and vacuum. The most common thing used by garage shop guys is a pressure or vacuum pot about the size of a large paint bucket. Pressure seems to be favored by some because vacuum can be quite messy as the air bubbles out of your resin.

There are a number of videos on YouTube of people making parts this way. Many are hack jobs, but you can still learn from them. The guy with the talking sock puppet annoys the heck out of me, but he has spent some time doing this sort of part making. I seem to recall that you do not have high speed Internet. Your local public library may have a computer area you can use, or you can take your laptop (if it has appropriate security software installed) over to a coffee shop during one of their slower times of day. After you have a firm grasp of basic processes then its time to contact some manufacturers and see about product properties for your application.

If you have a parts that "needs" to be a heat vulcanized rubber then its probably out of the reach of basic garage shop work. I think other resins will fill most needs though.

---------------- I now have a 10GB per month cellular Internet service.

"...vacuum can be quite messy as the air bubbles out of your resin."

Oh, I know. I spent an afternoon chipping epoxy spills out of my second-hand vacuum oven. Replacing the electrical feedthru with a solid pipe plug cured its leak and the door gasket is still good.

Typically the old brittle parts I want to replace are round, like grommets and connector boots, amenable to semi-precision lathe work. I'm considering two opposed pistons in an open tube such as a drum brake wheel cylinder, optionally with vacuum connected to the fluid port. The rubber or plastic could be a slug of correct weight or volume that will be compressed hot into final shape between the piston mold halves. Sliding the cylinder would move the port clear of the part, avoiding a sprue. After the mold cools the pistons and part can be pressed out one end and separated. I think that will bypass the complexity of DIY injection molding.

Can you suggest a suitable rubber compound from experience? I can't find my Durometer to check a sample. Car radiator hose is about the right hardness, maybe around 50.

I have not really done the type of work you want to do, but I have used Ooomoo (20ish I think), MoldMax 29, and SortaClear 37A. SortaClear is pretty tough, and well sorta clear. Those are all Smooth-On silicone rubbers used primarily for making silicone molds. I've done a bit more work with the SortaClear since its a food grade resin. I've made a number of food molds from it. I haven't worked with any of the urethane rubbers. SmoothOn probably has the widest range of resins I've seen, but some people do not like SmoothOn for some reason. The Platinum cure silicones tend to handle a little higher heat than the Tin cure silicones. Other than that I think you would need to read up on the chemical resistance for the application. One thing I've been thinking about making is primer bulbs for small gas powered hand tools. The primer bulb is the first failure point on a lot of them. Now I just need to see what is resistant to gas and oil.

I have not really done the type of work you want to do, but I have used Ooomoo (20ish I think), MoldMax 29, and SortaClear 37A. SortaClear is pretty tough, and well sorta clear. Those are all Smooth-On silicone rubbers used primarily for making silicone molds. I've done a bit more work with the SortaClear since its a food grade resin. I've made a number of food molds from it. I haven't worked with any of the urethane rubbers. SmoothOn probably has the widest range of resins I've seen, but some people do not like SmoothOn for some reason. The Platinum cure silicones tend to handle a little higher heat than the Tin cure silicones. Other than that I think you would need to read up on the chemical resistance for the application. One thing I've been thinking about making is primer bulbs for small gas powered hand tools. The primer bulb is the first failure point on a lot of them. Now I just need to see what is resistant to gas and oil.

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OK, I was hoping you had experience with Urethane. I did, back when I was learning Chemistry, pre-EPA. The Adiprene castings were extremely tough but more like a hockey puck than flexible tubing. The goal was to replace leather rather than rubber.

FlexSeal has far too little tensile strength to substitute for rubber.

These primer bulbs are easy to install:

installed the clear version a few years ago and it's held up well. That is the sort of item I'd like to be able to make if unavailable, but not one that could cause a gas spill. Did you ever notice that the red and black fuel shutoff valves have a not-for-gas symbol on them?

Unless I paid $20 for Atwoods, in-line primers have quickly hardened.

I made a pressure primer for my Honda EU1000i from a rubber stopper that fits the fuel filler and a cheap valveless siphon bulb. The outlet check valve is a rubber flap screwed under the hole through the stopper, the intake valve is my thumb. It also blows the tank, pump and carb empty for storage. The kerosine pump Honda suggests to drain the tank doesn't get everything.