Extra small drill chuck for the tailstock.

[David Kirtley]

I had a little drill chuck I had bought to play with an old Emco lathe. Well, I didn't really have anything to do with the lathe any more so I decided to use the chuck on my lathe. It has and M14x1.0 thread and my lathe has an MT2 tailstock. Perfect chance to make my first MT2 taper.

I set the compound to the MT2 angle by putting an MT2 arbor in the chuck and running up and down on the taper with a dial gauge until I got it to zero for the length of the taper. Then I turned the taper on some 12L14 and began the wait. I had no way to hold it to turn the other end. I ordered a MT3-MT2 adapter and when it got here tonight, I took off the chuck and put the arbor in the the headstock to turn.

Turned it to just under 14mm and then threaded it with a die. I had to do a little tuning with a file as I didn't get the angle perfect on the taper. Once I did a little fitting and tuning, it seated nicely. Only thing I forgot to turn a chamfer on the end of the taper. Well, I will on the next one.

Half inch chuck for comparison.

 

[Tony Wells]

Nice Job, David. It's always the little things we learn along the way that make this hobby get more fun along the way, because things turn out more and more how we envision them. I think you'll get a lot of use out of the smaller chuck when you need a more precise smaller hole drilled.

 

[David Kirtley]

Thanks,

The other advantage is that sometimes the size of the 1/2 in chuck interferes with the toolpost when I am swapping stuff out quickly for a short "production run". I am also going to see about a smaller live center for the same reason.

 

[Ray C]

Nice, Randy.

It's odd this should come-up. I just started designing a turret-style attachment to replace the standard tailstock -and the main motivation is to easily switch between chucks capable of doing large boring vs a quick center hole. The amount of time spent swapping-out chucks and/or changing bits causes distraction for me.

Of course, once I started to design the turret head, I threw every attachment on there but the kitchen sink. I've got a design that will be expandable and am in the process of defining which attachment types to go after first.

Ray