Reply To: making a collet or sub collet

[david pierce]

Paul,
There are some tricks to making collets. The hole should be marked for the center with a small center drill or a graver, then drilled under size, This is importent because a drill will not drill a round hole. The hole then needs to be bored with a single lip cutter (boreing bar) then reamed to size. Next, the collet needs to be put on centers and turned to the final outside diameter. Do not try to finish the outside diameter first and then drill, bore and ream the hole second. To slot the collets you need to make an indexing fixture attached to an indexing head. The head of the collet must be longer than the final collet to provide stability during the slitting operation. The saw must not cut through this end. The slitting operation will cut through the fixture and the collet on each index. Make sure you have a brass pin weged into the collet hole during this operation. The last operation is to chuck the collet into a lathe with the brass pin and machine the head to the final size.
david