Lathe Collets

 

My smallest lathe chuck will only go down to a diameter of about 12 mm, which is mostly fine, but on occasion I want to turn something a bit teensier.

So I made a set of collets in Blender and 3d printed them.

With this set I can get down to about 7.5 or 7 mm, but if I need to go any smaller than that I can whip up another collet in about quarter of an hour.

Because they're being used for very small pieces, they don't have to endure much in the way of working pressure. Which is good, because though PLA filament is fairly tough for plastic, it is still just plastic.

I did once buy a set of jaws from AliExpress that would go down to about 6 mm, but it turned out once they arrived that not only would they not fit on the chuck they said they would, they wouldn't fit on any of the other chucks I had either. They'd need some attention from a machinist to make them fit, and I don't have those skills or that equipment. Fortunately, they were fairly cheap, so I didn't lose much by it. But it still pissed me off.