It’s the last week in January and it sure feels like winter, here! More snow forecast for tomorrow and then again for Sunday. May just get to use that snow blower, yet!!!

 

A turner friend has been having some difficulty drilling his pen blanks. His drill press is a little under powered and difficult to keep aligned. He mentioned buying a set of those long pen jaws for his new chuck. My thought is why buy when you can make. His new chuck is a TeknaTool midi chuck- same as mine- so it would be fairly easy to make something that would fit.

 

A couple of years ago, I made a set of jaw for my chuck to assist in the sanding and turning of the salt cellars I was making. So this was about the same.

 

I started with a round plywood base, trued up on the lathe.

 

 

 

Using the lathe indexing pin, marked the 4 quadrants for the jaws.

 

 

A little design sketches on the surface to see how big things should be

 

 

Then a 2†thick blank of oak (should have used maple for tighter grain)

 

Center glued the jaw blank to the base. I use a small finish nail for alignment. The base is drilled through with a closely sized hole and the jaw blank is also drilled about .25†to capture the nail. Remove the nail before the glue dries!

 

 

Then trued the base and jaw blank

 

 

Used the chuck jaws and referenced each location

 

 

Carefully align each chuck piece to the layout lines and clamp. I used a piece of sand paper to keep the metal jaws from slipping.

 

 

Mark the hole location for drilling. Got really lucky here. My smallest Vix bit fit the jaw holes perfectly and the drill bit marked the center of the hole.

 

 

Drilled the holes for the screws. The original jaw screws are flat heads (metric threads). I used metric socket head cap screws. 1†length work perfectly with the .75†thick plywood base.

 

 

Next I counter bored the oak for the head/washer size. These counter bores stopped at the plywood. In hindsight, I should not have drilled the 4 counter bore holes- closest to the center to NOT include the washer diameter. There isn’t much “meat†left to capture the pen blanks.

 

 

To create the square hole in the center of the jaws, I used a .5†mortising bit on my hollow chisel mortiser.

 

 

Finally, I cut the finished piece into quarters and mounted it on the chuck base. To check how well it drilled, I mounted a piece of wood and picked the largest bit I had.

 

 

Seems pretty good!

 

This time I got a little smarter and created a layout jig for the jaw spacing. Just in case I want to make any other custom jaws for the same chuck

 

 

A couple of neat videos popped up, this week-

One from Woodcraft on making a spinning top- can you say grandkids??

 

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152865900667911  

 

And a really cool turned bottle opener that you don’t need to purchase a kit-

http://youtu.be/AAWtOg1kHRU  

 

Safe Turning!

 

 

Now that is just plain awesome!!!

Great job Lew.

Now if I only had a chuck. soon hopefully in March or April after show season starts back up.

Good post Lew. What are the funny characters all through your post? Even in the first word and it has "TM" in it.

@Gerald It appears the software here didn't like my use of a quote mark to represent the term "inch" or an apostrophe mark. 

A blast from the past.  Still a nice post.  Good job on the jaws.

Nice job on those jaws and a great job on the pictorial!

 

Steve

Thanks Lew!

thanks...

 

Great tutorial Lew...Thanks for bringing this forward...