R8 Collet Quick Change or Regular

My X3 came with feet. Which I didn’t use because I bolted it to a home made heavy table. If you want my feet let me know, I can go look for them.

walt

Didn’t think of that, Mike. You are right.

Buy the shortest length-of-cut endmills you can. They are stiffer and therefore less prone to chatter and deflecting your machine.

Don’t put the flutes up in the collets, but get as close as you can and use the shortest endmill you can.

Jim

Synopsis,

I wouldn’t spend the money if you are not CNC. The greatest benefit is you can load your tools and enter them in the ‘tool table’ so you don’t have to re-zero the Z axis everytime you change tools (it remembers lengths and diameters associated with a tool).

I think you might actually lose time since you won’t have a holder for each tool, and you’ll be changing them out of the QC holder when you could be just putting a new collet in.

One thing that you can do as you buy endmills etc is to buy them all in the same shank size, say 3/8″. Then you don’t have to change collets when you change tools. You also won’t need every size collet.

I have the Tormach system and like it very much. But don’t see the benefit for a manual mill, really.

Jim

Basically its an adapter from R8 to ER system, looks like ER40. I considered making an adapter to go on my lathe, from 5MT to ER50 in order to use collets and studied them. The ER systems are nice because they are self ejecting, but still use a wrench. I’ve worked with a friend’s enormous mill that had ER collets and wasn’t that impressed with them, but it worked. In my limited experience the R8 seemed more accurate, but others have had the opposite experience.

For me the R8 serves better because the ER is very limited in size. Obviously you cannot use a larger tool than your bore, but due to the adapter, your R8 bore is no longer the limiting factor; it’s the adapter bore that will now limit you. May not be a big deal to you, but for me, I always look for the largest tooling that will fit (for instance, when selecting a flycutter, I bought like 3 different ones, including carbide insert types just to try them out) because it’s stiffer and gives a better finish. Also for critical work in very hard steels, you’ll need the extra beef.

ER is the newest collet system to arrive on the market, so there are not as many used sets around and what sets are there, are more expensive (may not be a consideration for you). You don’t normally think of collets as ‘fads’ that may not be around tomorrow; but look at the SJ series. Instead of making an adapter, I found a cheap one on ebay and bought it… it’s a Jacobs and uses their ‘rubberflex’ collets, which also aren’t made anymore, but only recently, so there are still lots floating around. I found a set will little time on them and weren’t abused, hold very very good tolerance on my machine.

The only real advantage I can see on the ER is that it is front tighten (bottom, to you). But, on the stupid Grizzly setup, this makes no difference as I have to use (I have the X3, similar to yours but different spindle, yours may have a lock of some sort) their RIDICULOUSLY stupid spanner wrench to hold the spindle. The spanner is 2 fingers, tiny tiny tiny, that go up into 2 little holes on a collar in the spindle down low near where it exits the head. Then, your other hand has to go UP to the top of the machine to tighten or loosen the drawbar. Have to figure out a way to make a spindle brake instead, that would save lots more time than a QR setup.

My 2 cents.

aloha,
walt