Habor freight drill chuck

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ToddMR

ToddMR

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Before I talk about this, I am not planning to use this to drill on the lathe. I get great results already with my DP.

I was looking for a chuck for my Jet 1014 and was eye balling the one at PSI for $25. I am going to turn a 3 piece walking stick from WTC at some point. I have the mahogany, I have a 5/16 bit, my buddy has the 29/64 bit. So it came down to needing the chuck to hold the threaded bolt from the coupler on the bottom two sections. So looking around I found a 1/2" MT2 chuck at Harbor Freight for $7.99. Super cheap I know. I found one of the two local stores that had them, so I snagged two, one for me and one for my buddy and fellow turner. It seems to be an alright chuck. He messed with it last night and it seemed to hold up pretty well. Anyhow I just thought I would mention it on here. I am not expecting great things from this chuck and will probably one day get a "nice" chuck. But since money is tight and I mainly need it for this one project I figured what the heck. Now if I were going to be drilling using it, that would be a different story. Can't wait to get this stick turning. It will have three 13" sections.
 
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I have the same one too. I took mine to a local machine shop and had them drill and tap it for a homemade drawbar. I'm using when turning bottle stoppers. Now I don't have to keep pressure on it to stay in the lathe.
 
Wow that's awesome to hear that you all are having good luck with it for drilling. You know how it is though, just worries me since it was only $8. Good to hear it seems to hold up for a few of you. Maybe in the future I will try it, for now I am pretty confident on it working well for my stick. Thanks everyone!
 
For what it's worth, a Jacobs chuck is a super common item, manufactured by the bazillions for every kind of application. The economy of scale of production means that you can among other things, manufacturer a product of quite high quality for extremely low costs if you can sell them in hundred thousand unit lots. Or you can manufacturer very low quality units and have trouble selling them at all because the better ones are still quite cheap. Not to say that there are not poor quality jacobs chucks out there, cause there are, they are just not that common. The other factor in play is that the jacobs taper is standardized, as is the morse taper, and it's quite easy to manufacture a bit with one of each on the ends.

Now, a er32 chuck has a MUCH smaller market, mostly being used by production machinists, who have NO tolerance for poor quality tooling, so there is little incentive for manufacturing large runs of them, therefore the cost stays fairly high.

Woodworking scroll chucks have a TINY market, relatively speaking, and while lots of woodworkers will buy mediocre quality if the price is low enough (I know, cause I are one) there just arent enough of us around to purchase the quantities of these products that would make the large scale manufacturing of them profitable enough to drive the costs down.

Which is why I will buy a generic jacobs chuck for 8 bucks without hesitation, but am never buying another cheap scroll chuck or collet chuck.

You will now be returned to your previously selected subjects :-)

James
 
I also have two. I use one for drilling and the other for barrel trimming/squaring blanks. The only thing about them is that they are a little long.
 
yup.. me too! drill with it, Use it in the headstock for bottle stoppers and pendants, all kinds of applications!
 
I have at least a dozen of the HF MT2 drill chucks. They are cheap enough that it's easier to leave drill bits installed and swap chucks in the tailstock when I want to drill different sizes. That's especially convenient when I'm drilling bullets on the lathe.

Regards,
Eric
 
A friend came up with a good idea at my last woodturners club meeting. He prowls garages sales, flea markets and the like. He looks for old cordless drills that have gone bad. Usually they can be purchased for one or two dollars. He takes out the chucks and uses those for a big variety of applications.
 
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