Making a longer chuck key

Well, been using my wrench a while and I rather like it. The length is good, and the arms are long enough to tighten the chuck without lots of force. Thought I'd do one for my 3 jaw chuck. The original wrench was ridiculously short, with short arms and sleeves on the arms which always slipped. Had enough of that!

This one took a few hours. That's because, 1) I knew what I needed to do, 2) had all the stock, and 3) had all the miscellaneous tooling and stuff that I had to make previously. No drama. Easy! Used a 1/4-20 1/4" long set screw to retain the handle. 5/8" O1 turned down to 1/2". Last section on the right turned down to 10mm. Used a mill and a square collect block to remove 1mm from each face of the 10mm. Resultant key size 8mm. Since I didn't have a 5/8" 5C collet, I poked about in my tool bench and found a 16mm 5C collet. Well that's within 0.005", that should hold. Grabbed the 5/8" in the 16mm collet and used an 11/32" carbide center cutting end mill to drill through the hole. Used the end mill rather than a drill. The previous time I used a 11/32" drill, which was undersized. That was a pain. This time the end mill cut just a touch over, and the 11/32" O1 rod fit nicely. The hole came out pretty nice, although there is a tiny chip on the entry hole. Only a machinist would notice. The metal fractured there.
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No more busted knuckles. Happy that this was just a straight forward simple job, rather than a long drawn out affair. Needed a simple machining project to get back in the saddle. Like it in white, but maybe I'll blue it.
 
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Looks good, and I understood everything you said. You're doing great!
 
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