TIL those cheap Chinese collets wrecked my last job run

I bought a 20 pack of ER16 collets off Amazon for $35 back in June. Ran them fine for a couple weeks until one let my endmill slip mid-cut on a $400 piece of 6061. The part was trashed and I lost like 6 hours of setup time. Has anyone else had luck finding decent budget collets or do I just need to bite the bullet on the name brand ones?

2 comments

2 Comments

richard_mason1mo ago

@evan_morgan81 brings up a really good point about the mid range stuff. MariTool and Rego-Fix are the gold standard for sure but Lyndex has always treated me well for the price. I went with Lyndex after my own cheap Amazon set wrecked a part and the runout difference was night and day. Those cheap collets are hit or miss from batch to batch and you never know when you'll get a set that's just barely out of spec. The real trick is checking the TIR on every single collet when you get them regardless of what you spend. A $5 indicator can save you a $400 block of aluminum.

evan_morgan811mo ago

Yeah, I learned that lesson the hard way too. A $35 set of collets from some random Chinese brand let a 1/2 inch rougher walk out on me during a critical pass on a stainless job. The runout was probably 0.005 inches before that, and I just thought "eh, it's fine." But when that cutter slipped, it ripped a chunk out of the part and snapped the endmill. What brand of collets did you end up buying for the replacement set? Because I'm trying to figure out if the mid-range stuff like Lyndex or something similar is worth the extra money, or if you really have to go all the way to MariTool or Rego-Fix to get something that actually holds tight.