Thread: Chinese arbors

I am after a couple of arbors..an MT1 to B12 and a MT1 to 1/2 UNF... These are quite reasonable on Ebay, but was wondering, ..has anyone had any complaints about the quality of these items ?
Ken.

I have bought quite a few cheap arbors off aliexpress, sub $5 and they have mostly been really quite good, substantially softer than some of my older ones but just as true.

CTC tools in Hong Kong were ok when I dealt with them on Ebay now they seem to use there own sites .
MORSE TAPER DRILL CHUCK ARBOR WITH TANG (1PC) #L19 | CTC Tools

I think you'd be flat out trying to find an arbor that wasn't made in China, probably true of most tools for that matter.

If you learn how to set your cross slide to an exact taper using a sine bar taper setting gauge and a taper sine bar calculation program . You can knock up many arbors yourself . Without needing one to set off which means you don't have to buy one to make one .
This is what you need to get started at calculating your own tapers or putting in taper information from specs and then getting the half angle to apply to the sine bar program . That reads out a stack height which is the thickness of a machined ring , set of gauge blocks or a machined block or even feeler gauges , all can be used to set the taper gauge . Now I know that many will scream and yell about accuracy of the cross slide housing and blah blah blah but it will make very useable tapers . Even if your cross slide is a bit short you can make a shorter taper surface and machine the rest down it will still hold . Study up on sine bar theory and how it all works then the xls calc work sheet I built will make sense . Using this method I made NT 30 arbours that fitted better than some of the cheap ones I bought . The beauty of the system is once you have a ring machined for a certain taper you can reset that same taper in seconds . I have since modified my gauge and it now bolts down to the cross slide .
The two chrome shafts come out of an old printer and just cut it to length . Very precise shafting . The ring is a loose fit on the shaft and edge de-burring must be done very well and inspected well.

The pictures are not the hard work . The XLS document is the hard work .