Part of the patent drawing for this firm's lathe chuck

Allison Tool & Engineering Co.. of Los Angeles seems to have been established about 1943 to manufacture a patent lever-action collet chuck for lathes. By 1967 the name had changed to Allison Chuck Products, Inc., and was located in San Pedro. The company survived until at least 1977. In 1985, the last known owner of Allison Chuck Products, Marijan Knez, incorporated Allison Tool & Engineering, Inc., of Corona, California, but this business seems to have been very short-lived and we don't know if that firm made lathe chucks.

Information Sources

• Snippet from a 1944 issue of Machinery.

  The Allison Tool & Engineering Co., 4031 Whittier Blvd., Los Angeles 23, Calif., is placing on the market a new collet chuck made in two sizes, one for 1½-inch spindles, eight threads per inch, with a collet capacity of 7/8 inch, and the other for 2½-inch spindles with...

  A similar article is found in a 1944 issue of The Iron Age.
• Allison Chuck Products, Inc., is mentioned in a 1967 issue of Western Machinery and Steel World.
• A Channel Islands web page has the following news item.

  April 14, 1958 [LBI]:—Couple falls from capsizing boat, clings for hours. Two San Pedro residents drowned within shouting distance of the casino at Avalon, Santa Catalina Island, after three waves capsized their disabled boat. Two survivors were rescued after a 4-3/4 hour ordeal of clinging to the slippery bow of the sinking craft. Their shouts for help, first mistakenly as coming from land, finally attracted the attention of a phone operator at the Casino. She set off a search. Drowned were Vincent Mazor, 42, owner of Allison Chuck Products machine shop, 2003 S. Mesa St., San Pedro, and Mrs Jeanne Turner, 45, of 738 W. 20th St., San Pedro Cab Co. dispatcher. Rescued when the boat Sandra Lou flashed a spotlight on the bow of their foundered craft were Mr. and Mrs. Harold Ray Pennings, both 36, of 2251 Barbour Ct., San Pedro. Pennings, an employee of Mazor, had gone 50-50 with his boss to buy a 17-foot twin-engine boat this spring. The boat was on a shakedown cruise to Catalina when it ran out of gas and capsized about dusk Saturday. As the first wave battered the disabled boat, all the occupants but Mr. Pennings put on the preservers. Dumped into the sea when the third wave capsized the boat, the Pennings groped for the bow of the boat as it bobbed up after the craft overturned. The Pennings shouted for Mazor and Mrs. Turner to join them in clinging to the bow, but the current swept them away. For 2-1/2 hours after the boat capsized at 6:30 p.m. the Pennings and their drifting companions talked back and forth as they shouted for help toward the lights of Avalon. 'About 9 p.m. when we didn't hear them any longer, we hoped they had succeeded in swimming ashore,' Pennings told Constable John Windle. The Pennings were rescued about 11:15 p.m., shortly after the Casino phone operator heard their cries and alerted police and the harbor master to start a search. The bodies of Mazor and Mrs. Turner were found 45 minutes later, floating in life jackets a quarter of a mile from the boat wreckage. Mrs. Turner's husband drowned in a boating accident on a lake several years ago. The Pennings were treated overnight at Avalon Hospital, then went home Sunday by sea on the Catalina steamer. 'We don't feel up to flying,' they told friends. Pennings told Avalon police the mishap not only cost him his friends, but probably also his job. He assumes Mazor's machine shop, where he works, will be closed. The boating mishap brought to four the number of lives lost in the sea in the Southland over the weekend.

• A US Government web page lists this firm as a participant at "'Mach Tech '77', an offsite exhibition of metalworking equipment & machine tools, May 16-20, 1977", which took place in Tapiei, Taiwan.
• Listed in a 1985 Thomas' American Export Register: "Allison Chuck Products, P. O. Box 816, Corona, CA 91720... Marijan Knez, Pres. (Collet Chucks, Machine Tools and Tool Room Lathes.)" We suspect these tool room lathes were offshore imports, perhaps from Taiwan.
• Searching on the name Marijan Knez, we find an Allison Tool & Engineering, Inc., established 1985 and no longer active. We suspect that Allison Chuck Products was renamed but this is not certain and we do not know if Allison Tool & Engineering ever made or sold a lathe chuck.
• Obituary for Marijan Knez (1919-2010).