Is the collet holder for the metal lathe ready for use?
Has it been tested for alignment?
What size collet does it use and do we have them?
Yes, it is ready for use. It uses 5C collets; we have a set of them on the table by the mill (where the collet chuck is also located). I don’t know how precisely the alignment has been checked, but it has certainly been acceptable for a couple of projects of mine.
@Hoosier I found that the collet chuck has high and low side. If you are getting unacceptable runout. You can find the high and low side with a dial indicator. I also cleaned a tiny ridge on the edge of the taper on the chuck side with some emory cloth. I didn’t have a stone. I also rotated the chuck 180 and got much better results. It is now about .02 mm runout. I drew a sharpie mark to help indicate. I will bring stamp to help with a permanent mark to ease finding the mark.
Thanks Joe,
That mark should help a lot. I could see a varying gap between the chuck
and the face plate but couldn’t find any rotation that improved it. A
permanent index mark sounds great.
Dave