PNC-3000 part 5

Next on the list is tooling.
There is only one collet for the mill, which only accepts things with a 6mm shaft, and it comes with a 0.05mm runout.
It is possible to get an adapter to ER16, but this sticks out quite a lot, taking away some of the 150mm Z travel, and it's also it's a bit pricy. I did order a loose ER11 chuck, so I intend to try out the concept in a DIY fashion, but I't probably won't be the future strategy.
The initial plan was to make something like a weldon style collet, and make a bunch of them, this would make swapping tools relatively easy, but since I don't have a CNC lathe this is a relatively time consuming task, so instead I have tested tool sleves.

Both works relatively well, the runout is obviously better in the bottom one, both sleves is made so that the tool bottoms out. This gives a repeatability of ~0.05mm in length, which is fine for most of what I do.
I'll still need to make a new collet, and this needs to be relatively precise. At least better than the old one that came with the mill, or else the it would be a waste of time to make a new one.. The collet isn't overly complex, but it still has a number of features, I did try to make one in stainless, that turned out really nice, apart from the thread, where I got the major diameter 0.5mm wrong.
I failed epicly in trying to correct the error.

This was the final argument in the process of deciding to get a 4 jaw for my lathe, I managed to find a really nice Burned chuck at a good price relatively close to the property. Only problem was that it was for a Boxford lathe (I think), so I needed a backplate for it. So most of the weekend was spend in the garage, making an adapter plate.


This opens up a whole new world of possibilities, for special tooling and fixtures, remounting stuff in the chuck without runout, and maybe even taking over the world..

It's not all joy though, as I seem to have an issue with the jaws not being perfectly squared to the chuck.

The mill has a toolsetter, but I also need an edge finder, which is a bit of a problem since almost all edge finders comes with a 10mm or 20mm shaft which won't fit in the mill. So I'll attempt to make one myself. The concept is pretty simple, a diode lights up, when the probe makes contact with the stock, or anything else which is grounded to the mill.
The probe end needs to be isolated from the rest of the machine, to facilitate that I have epoxied  a brass tube around a iron shaft.

 Initially I planed to turn down the end of the probe in the mill, to make sure that it would have zero runout, but since the mill has quite a bit of runout, and I'm now in possession of a 4 jaw chuck, it will be finished up there, when I have got the runout under control.