Over the last two or three years I have slowly gone round and replaced all the drill chucks with keyless ones.
Not a small task as each machine has 2 to 4 chucks to speed operations up. It has been a worthwhile task though and I reckon at least 2 months of the year have been saved not having to look for a damn chuck key.
Each machine also has a strap wrench hanging on the tool board for that machine and it's only a 2 second job to give the chuck a quick tighten to stop the tool spinning.
I found that even with so called class chucks like Jacobs [ although I still feel they should have stuck to making Cream Crackers ] the keyed chucks, no matter how much you tightened them, they still spun the drills.
One thing I did find though that was when I bought my new TOS lathe it came fully tooled up and I had a real good deal off the importer. It came with four 1/2 capacity Jacob keyless chucks on MT4 tapers to for the tailstock.
None of these chucks survived the first year. They all self tightened as they do but then tightened to a point where they exploded internally. The only one I did manage to undo, everything fell out as shrapnel. I'm certain that the parts were over hardened.
These have now all been replaced with decent quality Chinese imports from a well know distributor in Leicester who shall remain nameless with not breakages in the last ? got to be 10 years.
Edited By John Stevenson on 27/12/2015 16:04:42