Stuck Millling Machine Collet

Sometimes, when the collet is put in when the machine is warm (especially if the collet is cool...) and tightened down real good, it can be a bit of a challenge to get it out, even if it hasn't been sitting. This is especially true if it has gotten cold in the shop in the mean time... Try putting a heat lamp on the spindle. And soaking it down with penetrating oil wouldn't hurt anything, either.
Jerry

I appreciate your predicament. I have a US Machine Tool vertical milling machine from, I assume, the 1940's. It, too had been sitting in a pretty much unheated shop for many years before I got it. Can you try drizzling Liquid wrench down the draw bar? Warmth will help, but only the hair drier kind, not a torch. Keep the drawbar screwed into the collet almost all the way when hitting down on it.
But now that I think about it: I don't mean to "talk down to you", but do you understand how the two wrenches work to loosen the collet? If your machine is like mine, you use two 7/8" box end wrench to do collet removal. You hold the lower wrench still on the "pressure nut" and turn the upper wrench on the "draw-in bar nut" CCW. The draw bolt rises out of the lower "pressure nut" several turns and then comes to a stop. You pull on the uppper wrench (CCW) to PUSH the collet out. When you have, maybe 25 or 30 ft pounds of pressure, if the collet isn't loose, that is the time to tap with the lead hammer. If none of this makes sense, email me off-list and we can go further.
Pete Stanaitis --------------------------------
Jeff wrote:

Good Thought! How about warming the spindle, then inserting the tube from a can of "circuit freezer" up into the collet to cool and shrink it, while the spindle is still warm--- "Circuit freezer" used to be freon 12, but whatever you can get that cools rapidly as it expands would work. CO2 cartridges (in an appropriate dispenser), for example. A 100 degree difference between the two would yield a shrink of 6 tenths of a thou.
Pete Stanaits --------------------
Jerry Foster wrote:

Sorry to repost this, but this post was supposed to relate to the one by Jerry Foster, not to my own post. Pete Stanaitis ------------------------
spaco wrote: