noob question about collets.

[Paull1979]

It just came up last night at work. I asked my boss who has been doing this for years if there is a way to tell a sealed vs a unsealed collet from one another and he couldnt give me an answer. So my question for you fine gentlemen is? is there actually a way to tell if the collet is sealed or not without having to put a tool in it and put in machine to see. I am going through and organizing our shop some and really would like to keep the sealed and unsealed seperate to help with quicker tool changes between changeovers since we dont have enough CAT40 holders to have tools for each program set and ready to go

 

[Booze Daily]

My ER collets have rubber plugs in the slots to block the coolant flow. I assume for TSC?

 

[camhead420]

The sealed steel collets have splits that do not line up. Just look for that.

 

[wmpy]

Look at the pictures of the ER collets here.

Tool Holders, Collets and Machine Accessories Collets And Sleeves - MariTool

www.maritool.com

The regular collets have slots that go all the way from top to bottom. The sealed collets have slots that only go about 2/3 of the way.

Also, the face of most coolant collets is usually marked "CL".

It's important to know which of your collets are coolant collets becuse the coolant collets have much less of a closing range. I had a drill push back because someone who didn't know used a coolant collet that couldn't grip it properly. It caused a few broken tools and a teachable moment.

 

[Zeuserdoo]

We gathered up all of the sealed collets in our shop and had them sent out for black oxide. It's a great way to keep sealed and regular collets separated easily with just a glance. Shiny steel = regular collet. Black oxide = sealed collet.