Thread: How to lock morse taper

With a drawbar. Drills don't have drawbars. Mills do.

Morse tapers used on milling machines are generally held by a draw bar. Even though the Morse taper is self locking lateral or sideways forces will cause them to come loose. Unless your drill press has a through hole done the centre of the spindle you will probably not be able to stop the Morse taper becoming loose when trying to mill. If you can rig up some sort of retaining ring to fit around the Morse taper and drill and tap the bottom of your drill quill you may be able to lock the Morse taper with this method.

Depends how much trouble you want to go to. I guess it may not be impossible to modify the spindle to fit a nut to the front. But it may be more work than is worth while.

What size cutters are you using? One thing I've had in mine for thin work being lifted up by the helix angle of the cutter, which maybe part of your problem in reverse, is to use router bits with no helix angle. It MIGHT help, it might not, it would likely make other things worse because all the edge starts and stops the cut at the same time.

Stuart

p.s. I type to slow lol

Originally Posted by phaser

I fitted an X Y vice to my drill press for milling small items in plastic or aluminium and struck a problem.
Sometimes the vibration causes the drill chuck's #2 morse to let go and drop onto the job.
Any ideas how to lock in the morse ?

Use a welder.

Sorry but this is a very, very well-known problem (as 5 minutes spent on a Google search would have revealed) and unless your drill press is super rigid, even if you do manage to stop the taper from self-freeing, all that will happen is the next thing in the chain will cause problems.

You are probably also holding the cutters in the drill chuck. That doesn't work real well either.

A drill press is designed to take axial loads, not side loads. You're on a hiding to nothing.

PDW

You do see pictures of drill presses with X-Y tables on them, but it gives a false impression. On a drill press they should only be used for positioning so that a hole group can be drilled accurately (for example, 3 holes spaced precisely along a line or a pattern of holes in a square say)

Michael

I do some pretty serious milling in my drill press with an mt2 taper and no drawbar.
I initially had a keyless chuck which used an R8 to mt2 arbor which would separate under heavy side loading but i dont remember the morse ever coming loose, pretty sure it was always the R8.

I now use an er32 collet holder which has the mt2 shank built in, no adapter and it has never come out even slotting very deep through alloy and even steel. I think because it is much shorter there is far less leverage on the taper. I did knock the taper in pretty hard with a hammer and also drove the z axis down until it lost steps (with a drift between the collet holder and table) to be doubly sure. I think i will struggle to remove it now.


As mentioned look at rigidity too which may vibrate things loose.

I suppose you could add some bearing retainer to the taper before installing too. Some 680 smeared over all the surface area of the mt2 would provide lots of locking, good luck ever getting it apart though.

Oh and dont forget the basic stuff, like making sure the mating surfaces are 100% clean and rust free before assembly )

On the odd occasion my lathe did the same thing while drilling the job. Not a real problem there just the drill would spin in the taper socket. That was easily fixed with a spray of WD40. It uses a #3 morse.
WD makes them lock in real well but doesn't work for the drill press.
My drill is not a toy but a large 16 speed type.
Unfortunately for this case, the drill's taper drive is a splined shaft with no central hole, so there's no chance of fitting a long screw into the end of the morse.

I can't afford a mill and don't have the space for one anyway, in fact I don't think I'd get enough use out of one to warrant buying one.
I'm only using small cutters 6mm or so for small jobs, still it's a little disappointing cos I paid over $100 for the X Y vice for this purpose.

Phaser

Originally Posted by phaser

.
.
I'm only using small cutters 6mm or so for small jobs, still it's a little disappointing cos I paid over $100 for the X Y vice for this purpose.

Half your problem will be the cheap X-Y vice. Yes $100 is too cheap for an X-Y system for metal milling as it will not hold the work firmly enough and the resulting rattle and vibration will contribute to the MT falling out.
To get secure work holding you will need to spend quite a bit more than $100 on an X-Y table (eg $400) and then add a strong vice to the table but I wouldn't spend that sort of money as it is still no guarantee it will work.
Maybe you can look around for a used one but it has been years since I saw one of these.

There is something called a draw key which may help if your tooling is slotted.
See p7 of this pdf: http://www.scott-bakerco.com/files/GL_D440_94.pdf
I have no experience with them, but looks like a fun project to make one.

PS: That link came from here: #5 Morse Taper draw key

Originally Posted by phaser

On the odd occasion my lathe did the same thing while drilling the job. Not a real problem there just the drill would spin in the taper socket.
Phaser

Why don't you just mill with the lathe?

I do and it works fine. Set up the lathe for milling

Drill press is not designed to mill.

Rob

Originally Posted by BobL

Half your problem will be the cheap X-Y vice. Yes $100 is too cheap for an X-Y system for metal milling as it will not hold the work firmly enough and the resulting rattle and vibration will contribute to the MT falling out.
To get secure work holding you will need to spend quite a bit more than $100 on an X-Y table (eg $400) and then add a strong vice to the table but I wouldn't spend that sort of money as it is still no guarantee it will work.
Maybe you can look around for a used one but it has been years since I saw one of these.

No. The X Y vice I bought is a good strong one and has absolutely no slack whatsoever.
If anything, it's a little too tight.

Originally Posted by nearnexus

Why don't you just mill with the lathe?

I do and it works fine. Set up the lathe for milling

Drill press is not designed to mill.

Rob

The trouble there is, I would need to buy a mill to make that tool for the lathe, and it wouldn't work very well with my lathe cos it's a Colchester about 120 years old.

Bryan, I have explored using an MT draw key in a DP but the Mts used on most DPs don't use a slot. The MT removal slot in most DPs in located above the MT so that the removal key contacts the top of the MT to drive it out.
The space available in a DP quill for a draw key is also very limited because the quill turns inside a cylinder and this does not allow for a very long key. There probably is a clever way of doing it but I can't figure it out.

Originally Posted by phaser

No. The X Y vice I bought is a good strong one and has absolutely no slack whatsoever.
If anything, it's a little too tight.

It may appear to you that it has no slack but all mechanical systems have some slack and in the case of milling it usually needs to be smaller than humans can detect.
Even the the way the DP tables are relatively lightly mounted onto the DP post can contribute to the problem.
With your drill off, bring the table up close to the chuck and gently but firmly drive the fully open chuck onto a hard surface on the table and watch how much the table on a DP flexes.
My DP is an MT3 size drill with a chunky table but it still flexes way more than I like it to.
This is why X-Y tables on mills are so massive and attached to the mill with large dovetails and the vices used are held to the table with large bolts.

Unless you bought a used vice then none of the $100 - $200 X-Y vices I have seen around the place are likely to be up to the mark for for milling.
The fact that your DP is an MT2 and it's a X-Y vice, as opposed to an X-Y table immediately tells me whole system is unlikely to be rigid enough.
Reducing bit vibe is as much about table weight (which provides inertia) as it is about the strength or tightness of the vice and its ability to hold the work.

What sort of cutters are you using, more spirals on the bit is slower but may help reduce vibe