April is Collet Month!
It’s Time to Replace Those Collets!
One of our vendors, Southeast Tool, is educating everyone on the importance of replacing your CNC collets. One of the most common questions and concerns that turns up at the Southeast Tool factory is from broken tools.
If the shanks of your tools match the picture to the left, it is past time to replace them. To prevent the breakage of collets, they should be replaced two to three times a year. Once a collet has already been broken, the only way to fix them is to replace them. To avoid an emergency in your shop, Carbide Processors along with Southeast Tool strongly recommend maintaining your CNC collets to prevent serious breakage.
For newer woodworkers, or those that may be less familiar with what a collet really is, essentially a collet holds the router bit in place on the router. Typically, American bits measure 0.25 inches or 0.5 inch where as European bits measure 6 or 8 mm. The exterior of the collets are hexagonal in shape to allow woodworkers the ability to tighten or loosen them as they see fit by using a generic torque wrench. Additionally, the interior of all collets contains threads providing easier accessibility so that it can be attached properly to the motor arbor.
Like a lot of things, equipment that is used everyday needs to be maintained to prevent serious repercussions. Two specific examples come to mind, cars and computers. We all know how important it is to perform routine maintenance on our cars and computers and we know that if we don’t do so, the shelf life of the car diminishes drastically and our computers are more at risk for the dreadful “blue screen of death.”
I am using these two items as examples because I am recalling a conversation the President and I with our IT guru earlier in the week about the importance of preventative maintenance. It seems to fit in with the theme and the message we are trying to convey to all of you: replace those collets before, you too, have to experience an emergency.
Shop now to replace those collets before they break!
Tags: collet, router collet, Southeast Tool
Leave a Reply
