Common collet sizes

[Bill C.]

I'm getting ready to buy a new mill, and that got me thinking about collets and how many you actually need. The last (and only) mill I owned came with a large set of collets, and pretty much all the other mills I've used had a large set as well. Thinking back I can't remember using more than a handful of them. Lots of places sell 11 or 12 piece sets, but how many sizes do you really need if all your using them for, is to hold end mills. Out of curiosity, I grabbed the data below from msc's website, it's end mill shank size, and the count of each.

shank Diameter	count
1/8"	3450
5/32"	6
3/16"	1651
1/4"	1487
5/16"	1112
11/32"	1
3/8"	4328
7/16"	740
1/2"	2389
9/16"	200
5/8"	1495
3/4"	1769
7/8"	417

Based on my personal experience & the chart, it seems like at most I need 1/8", 3/16" 1/4", 5/16", 3/8", 1/2", 5/8" & 3/4" collets. What does everyone else think, Whats a necessity, and whats just nice to have?

I seem to remember 1/4", 1/2", 5/8" and 3/4" diameters in most of the shops. But it would depend on what you plan on making. If you were planning on machining small slots or pockets then you would need the smaller collets.

 

[Andre]

I have a full collet set, from 1/8" to 1/2" by 1/16ths, the only ones I can really admit to using are 3/8", and 1/2". They are the most common for my tooling. Some collets in my set have never even been used to be honest.