Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Keyless chuck....

Looking to replace a rather worn keyed chuck on my drill press. Wanting to go keyless.

This isn’t a precision tool just a run of the mill drill press so a little run out is ok.

What I have is a MT2 or #2 Morse taper so if the new chuck comes with a taper shaft already that saves one step.

I see them all over the place price wise on Amazon but don’t know exactly what direction to go.

Any advise or direction would be welcome.

I am a milling machine guy and don’t have a drill press. But I have had really good luck with the Rohm keyless chucks.

Albrecht is the top of the line and is available with a MT2 integral shank. IMHO a close second is Rohm but will require an MT2 arbor to match the chuck taper ( readily available). Jacobs is close to Rohm and is available with a MT2 shank. All the above chucks are expensive. It takes good steel and precision machine tools to make a good chuck. There is no way to make them cheap. Fortunately they are also rebuildable in case the mechanism wears or gets damaged. So you could buy good chuck and it could potentially be a lifetime investment and be moveable from machine to machine as you upgrade. If you can find a used Albrecht in decent shape, you can have it rebuilt to new specs and maybe save some money versus a new chuck of the same type. See Albrecht website.

Import chucks from China are a crap-shoot. Taiwan less so.

Keyless chucks will not drive a drill or tap backwards. It will lose its grip on the tool

RAN

Thanks, I’ve used Rohm before but on handheld tools. Will have to see what they as well as Albrecht offer.

+1 on Albrecht been the industry standard for years, they'll last a lifetime. I've owned several with zero problems ever.

I would recommend them also...

Well, I’ll confess, I went cheap.
I threw the dial indicator on my original chuck and found .008 runout. I couldn’t bring myself to spend the kinda coin Albrect would cost for what’s basically a $100 drill press. I picked up a Chumpower, Taiwanese made keyless chuck and a new JT6-MT2 adapter shaft for about $75 delivered. The nice part is the runout was cut in half.

While it would be nice to have top tier tooling it just didn’t make sense to spend that in this case.

I have 7 Albrect chucks and 1 Rohm. The outer housing on my Rohm broke in two and parts is much higher than another Albrect. Both brands are very good.

I've had good luck with Glacern. Claim 0.002" or less run out, which is what I am getting. An MT2 1/64-1/2" is $100 plus shipping. Bought a machine vise for half of what a Kurt might run.