Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA
In my wanderings today, I picked up* a Stanley 1248 brace, which seems like a nice though unremarkable brace but with one fancy feature: a ball bearing chucks. The bad news is that, while the brace as a whole is pretty decent (rust being normal, but it's intact and the ratchet works), the chuck's frozen. Two questions:

1. Are there any particular advantages to these chucks over the shell chuck?

2. I dug around a little, hoping to find somewhere that explains how these are assembled or how to disassemble and service them; but without success, probably because I didn't know the magic words to type into Google. If anyone can help, I'll be right grateful.

Not sure how to justify yet another 10" sweep brace to myself...any help you can give me on that, too, would be welcomed.

*To get it, I also had to buy about ten bits, mostly duplicating sizes I've got, and some miscellaneous brace stuff, along with, for some reason, several cold chisels. The seller tried to close the deal by pointing out that he'd throw in the 5-gallon plastic bucket; I politely didn't tell him I had a dozen or so plastic buckets at home.