TIL those cheap Chinese collets wrecked my last job run

I bought a 20 pack of ER16 collets off Amazon for $35 back in June. Ran them fine for a couple weeks until one let my endmill slip mid-cut on a $400 piece of 6061. The part was trashed and I lost like 6 hours of setup time. Has anyone else had luck finding decent budget collets or do I just need to bite the bullet on the name brand ones?

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evan_morgan8118m ago

Yeah, I learned that lesson the hard way too. A $35 set of collets from some random Chinese brand let a 1/2 inch rougher walk out on me during a critical pass on a stainless job. The runout was probably 0.005 inches before that, and I just thought "eh, it's fine." But when that cutter slipped, it ripped a chunk out of the part and snapped the endmill. What brand of collets did you end up buying for the replacement set? Because I'm trying to figure out if the mid-range stuff like Lyndex or something similar is worth the extra money, or if you really have to go all the way to MariTool or Rego-Fix to get something that actually holds tight.