Thread: ER25 Chuck body

Following on from the description of various ways of holding pen mandrels HERE

Have added another mandrel holding chuck to my pen turning arsenal. As can be seen in the previous posts, I am rather keen on the ER25 collets to hold a pen turning mandrel, as well as other things such as cartridge cases etc.

I have been using an ER25 chuck with a MT2 taper mount. One of the disadvantages of this is that because of the design you can't pass longer items through this chuck so you limited to relatively short items.

Always wanted something like the Beall collet chuck which fits over the spindle rather than inside.
Beall however do not make one for M30x3.5, which is the thread on my lathe spindle.

The other day I was browsing the Vermec site to find an M30x3.5 insert for my new Vicmarc VM120 chuck and came across an ER25 chuck similar to the Beall one.

As I was ordering an insert from then anyway I decided to add the ER25 chuck to the order, the body only as I already have several ER25 nuts and spanners.

It arrived today and I was suitably impressed with it, Vermec certainly do some nice machining and the chuck body runs nice and true and all threads fit very well.

At $73 for the body only it is very competitive with the Beall ($US83 for body only).

Attachment 139454

The front thread is the standard M30x1.5 used on the ER25 chucks so it took my existing nuts very nicely.

Attachment 139455

Here it is shown with a mandrel inserted further in to the chuck to take a single blank, such as a Sierra.

Attachment 139456

Note the live centre, another recent addition to the tool kit. It is a Sorby live centre set( from The Woodsmith), which has several inserts in the set. It also has the advantage of beig much slimmer than my standard live centre (see previous photos) and still has 3 bearings in it. Again, very impressed with this set, much better quality than the Teknatool set I looked at in Carbatec.