New Lathe ER32 Woodworking Dowel Collet Chuck System 1/4 3/8 1/2 5/8 3/4 USA

I wanted to turn finials for a Christmas ornament project. The collet chuck system turned out to be just the thing. It holds work tight and is easy to install and uninstall from my lathe. I could have used some written instructions, but I've been using tools for decades and there are a lot of general-purpose instructions on how to use a collet chuck available online. I'm pleased with the quality of the tool. It seems solid and the threads are tight. The collets themselves are well milled.

Using this on my Taig micro lathe and works perfectly. With a half inch end mill at 25mm out less then 1/1000 run out with included 1/2 ER32 collet. Very nice unit.

Collet fit perfect on my lathe and worked for all the sizes I have tried so far.

I got the chuck setup on my lathe, put the collet into the nut, inserted my expanding mandrel, and tightened the whole thing down. when I spin the lathe by hand I can see the mandrel spinning off center. No matter what I try to align the chuck or collets it still moves about a 1/16" or more.

Great product, would buy again definitely.

Chuck seemed to be working at first but then started catching when backing off the nut. Upon inspection an inner ring near the beveled face was off center and too small to let the collet engage fully and properly. Instead of dealing with the down time of return and waiting to see if the replacement was any better I made repairs myself with a rotary tool. Now it works and engages the collet correctly and works better than it did out of the box. It is a good solid tool and would have got a much higher rating if it didn't take me half an hour to finish what they should have done.

I bought this for my Taig micro lathe. It consistently had about 0.004" of runout, which is absolutely useless since even a good 3 jaw chuck has less runout than that.However, the runout was repeatable and consistent. Fortunately, this collet chuck is not hardened, so I mounted it on the lathe, picked up the angle of the internal taper with a test indicator, and remachined it using the compound. I probably took off about 0.007" of material. Now it's under 0.0005" of runout.The collets are wildly inconsistent. My 1/4" collet seems to be the best, I get under 0.001" of runout holding a carbide end mill with that. Some of the other collets produce as much as 0.004" runout. But at this price, I expected the collets to be mostly junk.

I was running into a lot of issues with pieces not lining up properly that i would turn on my lathe but after getting this my wooden creations are spot on straight and wish I would have gotten this sooner.