I haven't had a chance to get to the lathe, this week. Been busy making the jewelry chests for the little girls next door. The foam ring inserts came this evening so I'll be able to push on with the project.

 

Last weeks "Wisdom" generated a question about the Longworth Chuck I used to turn the bottoms of the bowls and whether I had a tutorial on how to build one. I must confess, I stole the idea and combined several variations to make mine.

 

A Longworth Chuck is a self centering chuck used on objects like bowls. It consist of two "wheels" with opposing circular slots. When the wheels are turned, the holding devices spin in or out and can capture the work piece.

 

 

 

 

The above pix are from the web but similar to what I made. 

 

The biggest difference in mine from most of the shop made chucks is that I uses a threaded wooden adapter to mount mine onto the lathe.

 

 

My Delta lathe has a 1" x 8tpi spindle. I found an old tap at a sale- worked perfectly in wood! One thing to keep in mind, when tapping wood is that threads cut cleaner into side grain than into end grain.

 

A variety of "holders" can be used depending on the shape of the piece. Here the bowl sided reach a max at about half the height of the bowl. Longer holders are needed. These holders are just metal tubes covered with clear aquarium tubing.

 

 

Sometimes, I like to add a little insurance-

 

 

The small bowls shown last week had their widest point at the opening. For clamps, I used soft rubber stoppers, with a hole. They came from a local wine/beer making store.

 

 

If you think you might like to make one of these chucks, here are some links I used-

 

http://www.woodworkersinstitute.com/page.asp?p=1417

 

http://www.morewoodturning.net/articles/longworth.php

 

http://woodcentral.com/cgi-bin/readarticle.pl?dir=turning&file=articles_485.shtml

 

http://www.scrollsaws.com/WoodLathe/woodlatheLongworth.htm

 

http://www.woodworkersguide.com/2010/10/17/how-to-make-a-longworth-chuck/

 

http://http://blog.woodcraft.com/2012/04/how-to-make-a-longworth-chuck-with-ron-thompson/

 

 

Finally, in the spirit of the season, a turned Christmas tree ornament-

 

project1.pdf

 

Safe Turning!

Nice post.  I've been thinking of making one of those.

Oh now that is sweet! Thanks Lew for the wonderful topic today! And thanks for the PDF upload!

I just like the way that chuck looks, it looks cool and spacey man, like a kaleidoscope of sorts, and the design is insane, who ever would of thought!

Thanks for the kind words, guys!

Great post Lew. Thanks so much for posting this and sharing.