TG 100 collet chucks

Hi

I have acquired about 150 TG collets (no holders) of varying sizes and not sure if I should stick with these or sell on and go the ER route.

I am a beginner with a boxford lathe with just a 3 and 4 jaw chuck. I am buying a new mill this week ((prob amadeal ama30 or ama45) with a R8 shaft.

I have read the TG's hold better than ER's but for my hobby usage I suspect that is not really relevant for my simple hobbyist needs.

I did do a quick check on eBay and found nothing to hold these collects with a R8 fitting. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, if I do find one would it be a lot of money. (I.e specialist engineering money, not China sourced hobby money)

I'm also unsure if I have any options with getting a setup to work on the boxford?

Your collective wisdom will be gratefully received as I suspect my excitement at my initial good fortune may actually be a stepping stone to a better more suitable option.

Thanks in advance for your comments

Best regards

Keith MM

By acquired I mean I got them for nothing!

Keith,

Plenty of suppliers of milling chucks but yet to see anything you could use on your Boxford. You could be up and running with an ER set quite quickly, if you could find a suitable TG one is not going to be cheap, or you could try making one for your TG,s. I see that collet nuts are available and that's possibly the harder part to make. Looks like the gripping range of each ER is wider so fewer collets needed - less to store. What do TG 100 sell for on eg flea bay ? I'll have Seig SX3 R8 coming up for sale soon if that's of any interest, I'm in the South. R8 is a good choice, I don't use my ER set in the mill, too fiddle and require much more holding torque vs R8.

If you are getting a mill with R8 spindle then just use R8 collets. They are quite cheap, hold like **********, and give you an extra couple of inches working height. There is only a limited number of cutter shank diameters you will use, so you only need a small number of collets.

More to the point, what would be useful is a TG collet holder for the lathe, for which R8 is not appropriate. But as Tony says, you could easily make a holder if you can buy the nut.

Also looks as if TG collets only take a single size unlike ER that can grip a range. Just as well you have 150 of them!

I see that Arc charge only £4.50 for an R8 collet, so you could get an initial set of 4 for less than 20 quid, and add as you need extra sizes. Though when I got my Myford VMB I invested in a fairly full set of both metric and imperial as MSC had a good deal on sets.

I have both TG and ER they hold about the same in my view, but ER is will hold both metric and imperial, they span a full mm, TG are specific and so not as universal.

Shaun

Hi many thanks for your wise Words. I did not realise they were a one size only collet. I assumed they had a certain range. No wonder there are so many of them in the box!

As a beginner I will chose the simplistic option!

I will stick them on eBay which will hopefully finance the R8 collect sizes for the different milling cutters I need and hopefully go some way to getting an ER set up for the lathe.

Thanks again for your guidance

Keith MM