Hi Jelly, can you tell me what you mean by on Sheff?
My milling machine takes R8 too. I have a couple of Osborne Titanic chucks and collets which grip cutters really well, must be screw shank cutters though. I often trawl ebay to find R8 stuff and have a few bits such a Jacobs chuck and a R8 arbor taking parallel shank tools, held with grub screws. That seems to handle most of the ( very limited) work I do. However it's always good to hear of cheap sources, although then I do tend to buy bits on the basis that they might just come in handy. If you don't buy them then end up needing them, then you wish you'd boughf them while they were available instead of having to fork out serious money for new stuff. Of course, the reality is these bits end up in the tooling drawers and never do come in useful, well hardly ever.
A while ago I posted about a firm called MSC which sells tooling. They had 54 piece clamp sets for about £24 plus VAT pls postage, but only in 16mm. I had an email offering a further 15% discount, which almost covered the VAT, and shared an order with a friend so shared the postage. I ended up paying about £27 for the clamp set, decent quality, normally twice that price. I had to mill the Tee nuts to make them fit my table slots, but not complaining at that. If you place an order with them you will get fortnightly copies of their special offers flyer, although I have seen some of their stuff cheaper elsewhere. Decent used stuff is a much better option though if you can get it.
K