Brian, its probably the latter. My wife tells me that all the time I'm pretty sure its not just the shaft that's seizing up. There something pretty foul-smelling inside this contraption which I found when removing the screws. Baz describes it as 'crud'. I'm not sure that's quite how I would describe mine! I think a large animal has got inside and died.

Dave – thanks for the links. Very useful info. I must remember to do a bit more searching on here before posting As regards losing magnetism there seems to be some debate about that on the internet. But if I do, I'll just have to find out for myself how limiting that is for my tasks. I might be able to live with it. If not then I'll buy a new chuck.

Baz – thanks for your experience. I'll give that a go on the handle. After that I'm not sure mine is going to come apart as easily as yours did. But let me play a bit more and see what happens.

Gerry

Edited By gerry madden on 23/10/2021 19:32:57

As Mark Bolan said 'all I want is easy action' and that's what I now have on my mag chuck. It was a bit of a struggle to get the beast apart. I had to clamp the base-plate to my bench and get a crow-bar on the top-plate to separate it, but once apart it was really just a clean-up operation. A wire brushing and a dunk or two on a bucket of white spirit was mainly all that was required.

There were a couple of points worth mentioning for anyone else attempting this often frowned-upon task. The first one is that I found the epoxy fillings between the poles were protruding quite significantly above the inside surface for the top plate. Suspecting that these could be part of the cause of the operational stiffness I cut them back with a blade until they were absolutely flush. The chuck couldn't have been made like this so my guess is that the epoxy has swelled a little over time from oil absorption. In the pic below the 'white bits' indicate where the epoxy was cut back. This pic by the way was taken in the almost-finished condition. There was much more protrusion beforehand.

The second point was that the aluminium frame came with only one oil lubrication hole in it. This didn't make any sense to me as its just as important to let the rubbish out as put new oil in. So I drilled and tapped 3 additional M10 grub-screw holes so that there were two on each side.. I can now add oil and drain simultaneously whilst operating the chuck.

I have to say that this was a job well worth doing and I'm astounded at the improvement its made. I can operate the on/off handle easily with one hand now where as previously I needed two arms and an extension tube. Of course some might say that this improvement is because I have lost all the magnetism. I suppose I might have lost some, I can't actually prove it either way, but I honestly can't tell that the chuck is any different to before. If I put a rough cast iron plate 3" x 5" on the chuck I simply cannot move it by hand and that's good enough for me.

Gerry

Edited By gerry madden on 21/11/2021 12:56:34