keyless chucks

Good Morning, I am thinking of investing in some form of battery powered drill, principally for power feed to the top slide when machining 2 morse tapers. However, I am aware that when run in reverse, keyless chucks no longer grip drills, etc., so the reverse facility seems on the face of it to be a rather useless feature. All the drills that I have seen so far, are keyless, so maybe I should consider a powered screwdriver instead?. What do other members do?. Regards, Lynne

Keyless chucks on the average hand-held drill do not work in the same manner as the far more expensive keyless chucks you would buy for use in the lathe tailstock. Power drill chuck lock and quite happily transmit torque in either direction and you will have to undo the by hand.

Engineering type keyless chuck on left and power-drill type on right.

John

Edited By Journeyman on 23/11/2021 12:08:03

I have no problem undoing screws with a quick change holder held in my cordless and am more likely to chew up a screw head or shatter a bit before the chuck lets go.

Your biggest problem is likely to be that the lowest speed you can maintain on a cordless drill will be a bit to fast for a nice finish. A small screwdriver (not impact driver) would be better for slow speed and therefore slow feed.

All the bosch power drills I have had over the years have been used as power drivers too and I have not had issues running in reverse. The chucks do tend to go screek when tightening so maybe they encorporate some kind of ratchet brake which maintains the grip. My lathe keyless don't do that and they definitely undo in reverse thrust. Maybe you are overthinking this?

regards Martin

Hi Lynne,

I tend to replace the keyless chucks with quite cheap 1/2" keyed ones, mainly because the battery drills seem to use 10 mm capacity chucks that are quite poor and often or not I need to use a bigger drill. The ones I've bought are usually sold with an arbour intended for SDS drills. They are the same thread as the keyless ones and just screw straight on. Just beware though there is a left hand screw in the middle of the jaws, that you have to remove first and then replace when you have swapped the chuck.

I've probably eight or so spare keyless 10 mm drill chucks. One of them is only 8 mm !

Never had a problem unscrewing quite hard screws and the bit I use has never come loose except where I did not do it up tight enough in the first place.

Another point is that higher end cordless tools tend to come with a locking screw (left hand thread) in the chuck to prevent the chuck unscrewing from the drill

A thought for a complete alternative, which I intended to explore after I'd moved to my new workshop, but dropped when I found a cheap taper turning attachment. It may not turn out to be practical of course.

How about a flexible drive running off a standard socket and clamp on one end, and a slotted cup on the other, to suit your topslide handle.
Power this off the end of the leadscrew at the tailstock end, but with the carriage drive disengaged; a full range of speeds with no extra motors.

Inspiration for this came from my previous very compact workshop, where I used the lathe running slowly to rotate, via a flexible drive, items to be shaped on the Clarkson T&C grinder, such as centre punches and a solid carbide dead centre.
I use the latter, in conjunction with a boring head in the tailstock, so I can dial in an offset when turning Morse tapers, as it allows the use of the lathe power feed on the carriage, (which brings us back to where we started).
I preferred this method as the travel on the top slide isn't quite long enough to do the job easily in one bite.

Bill

Edited By peak4 on 23/11/2021 13:01:15

I always buy Bosch mains power drills, I am impressed by the quality, they take a lot of punishment before they let out magic smoke, the one thing that lets the product down are the keyless chucks that are fitted. No matter how tight you do the chuck it invariably allows the drill bits to spin and damage the shanks. Why are the keyless chucks so useless, are they not able to take the torque that the drill can generate? In industry I used to use a lot of pneumatic tools and we always used to hand tighten the chucks on windy drills, we never used chuck keys and the chucks never came undone. My only conclusion is that the keyless chucks fitted to electric drills are not designed to deal with the torque hence they constantly come undone. The keyless chuck on my Champion V20 mill/drill has never given problems but as stated above is a different animal. Dave W

Good morning, My thanks to you all for posting you views on the subject. I've been promising myself a drill for a while, so I will go down that route first. If speed is a issue, I'll then try the screwdriver. Regards, Lynne