John
Not such a (stupid) question, Arc Euro Trade list Imperial ER11 collets (available June) and PJ Tooling list a full range of ER25 Imperial sizes. Somebody other than you and I must also want them.
Yes but there is are three glitch's. J&L list imperial collets, they are listed as decimal sizes like
0.472" - 0.512" which low and behold equals 12 - 13mm.Next is a good glitch, they are cheaper then the metric listed ones.
Last glitch, when you order them they come marked up 12-13 on the face.
Now whether these new imperial ones promised by various supplies follow this line, one can only wait.
I can't see a problem with tightening down to fit 1/4". You don't have to do it all the time, only to initially fit the cutter and they will go down and grip, it's not as if you are straining it past a design point.
After working for years with conventional single split collets like the R8 and 5C these are a breath of fresh air. A while ago I had to turn some stepped pins up. 12mm stock with a
11.5mm step, then hold these on the 11.5 to work on the small 12mm step left. Two operations, work all the steps with a 12mm 5C collet then bore an emergency collet out to 11.5 for the rest of the work. Result is I now have a duff collet at 11.5 that probably won't get used again.-- Regards,
John Stevenson Nottingham, England.
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Does anyone do a soft collet in the ER type? One useful feature of having 5C emergency collets available is that they can be threaded. I know people say you can grip threads OK with ER collets, but that must have its limitations.
Cheers Tim
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A belated thank-you for the tip ! I bought one of these in ER32 at Guildford yesterday, they've no plans for an ER40 variant unfortunately but at least ER32 will pass 19mm stock which is the maximum that'll go down my spindle anyway.
It looks like a good 'un but obviously until I fit it to a backplate I won't really know. Speaking of which I notice that the register on the back of the collet chuck has a register that's perceptibly conical in outline. Ie, instead of being a cylindrical hole it's got a very slightly smaller diameter inside than it starts out at, can anyone tell me whether all chuck registers are like that ? The register is only about 3-4 mm deep so it's not like a morse taper or anything
I looked up the advice on lathes.co.uk regarding machining backplates and it didn't mention anything about sloping register sides. I suppose that the corresponding male register on the chuck backplate is intended just to be cylindrical and not to need a matching taper ?
Thanks,
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