Back in November , I bought a Flexi Chuck from Eccentric Engineering , Australia. I was in Sydney and got it while I was there, and decided to get the whole system with a couple of extra 50mm mandrels. The job I had in mind for it was an electric motor housing for an electric model plane.

Anyway, I have a project to make and repair a model engine that has full compliment bearings that are no longer made. So I set about getting different brands of bearings to find an outer race that matched very close to the originals, then set about to hold the races and to carefully mill the filling groove for the bearing.

I set the Flexichuck in the Myford lathe and trepan a groove to hold the race. I expanded the mandrel to about 0.2mm over the relaxed diameter. The groove was cut at just under the race diameter. It held the races very tightly. The side could be turned and the bearing reduced to 5mm thickness . Then it was turned over , and the filling slot was from the standard of the bearing. It was cut to about .02mm from the bottom of the slot to get the balls into the bearing.

The system has worked so well, I have ordered some more for the project that I had initially bought it for. Yes the mandrels could be made in the home workshop, but I would rather just use it , instead of spending time making the mandrels.

Anyway , here are the few pics I took. I run the milling cutter slow at around 200 rpm to cut the bearing slot, and dry. No burs were found, so was very happy with the final results of the parts.

Neil