Lathe Soft Jaws

hey YouTube welcome back to my shop I was just about to mount set of soft jaws on my three jaw to just knock out a couple of these little parts nothing no rocket science here but I thought I'd break the camera out maybe we do a short video shoot the poop as it were on soft jaws why they're so darn handy and why you'd want so many of them for the kind of stuff I do to be completely honest they don't come out all that often and you could probably see though these are pretty much how I received them with the lathe but when you do need them they a lifesaver now before we get too far you know what the heck are soft jaws what can you do with soft jaws so soft jaws are pretty much what the name implies their jaws that haven't been hardened and the reason that's good is you can cut them so you can cut any form you want into these jaws to accommodate the part that you're holding contrary to popular belief and what you might actually see on my lathe hard jaws are not supposed to be cut so I asked you to ignore any battle scars you might see here so in addition to the internal and the external set of jaws that I got with this chunk I also received three sets of soft jaws so the soft jaws start life out you know maybe looking something like this these have been formed you know they these things still have a lot of life left in them you can see the previous owner cut and a little round I guess they were holding up a little part maybe about an inch and a half in diameter and you can see this these other set here I'm not sure what part they were holding here but it looks like it had a little tapered section small round they've got an undercut there maybe just to handle some burrs and then the major diameter this looks a little bit bigger maybe like I was a three-inch part or so but the whole point of these is to be able to work with just odd I'm shooting from the hip here I just grabbed these out I might take my plumbing box but if you're trying to hold something like this I don't know why but if you were in your standard three jaw you know you're straight hardened jaws you'd run into a little I'm trying to get a good grip on these you know depending on what kind of operation you're trying to do let's take a look at this part I don't know what this came from but it's really thin wall it's got this little flange on the back similar to this part if you grabbed onto this with straight jaws this you know you don't you don't get a lot of registration so what you do what I do is Mount the soft jaws and then cut this profile into the jaw so now you're you potentially are registering on one of these shoulders and you're grabbing two diameters and you've got a lot of better hold on the part and registration what I'll be doing is just doing a simple counter bore and I'll and I'll show that to you so just so I can register these sort of mimicking a stop that you might have in the spindle to get a good depth good consistent repeatable depth I only need these within a couple of foul so you know it's not that critical so these are my soft jaws I can't take credit for these I think I've seen this idea around before I'm sure they look familiar I just used some hex stock that I had on hand and I still have it I don't go through a lot of material here this is I think 70 millimeter like two and three quarter inch hex and these were so I you know I received three sets of soft jaws with the lathe and I've used this set so much that there was just no more soft jaw left and you throw it away and I'd start using these what I did was machine the top so I could have slide in them and and mounted this hex on the top with some slots to key into them just a countersunk socket head cap screw let me put these on the truck and we'll take these apart these are on there pretty tight there's probably a drop a lock tight on there and I'll show you how these are meant to work all right so that's how they go on the truck you can see I don't remember exactly what this looking at it now looks like those maybe trying to get a small wash or small part to final thickness and it was probably thin to start off with and so to you know give it some good support a positive backstop and keep it square I just cut that little counterbore in there and pop pardon before I take this off the advantage to a set of Jaws like this as compared to your traditional soft jaws and these are a a single piece design it looks like actually someone welded that on there I don't know if you guys could see that so these jaws probably wore out and previous owner welded on a you know a piece of soft it's a mild steel just to extend these life they do make these in a split design where you have the actual jaw base and then you know replaceable or flippable top jaws but in contrast to something like this this is a you know you have one business end on these and so you make your part and then these are dedicated for that part where you recut them for the next part you go through them relatively fast these on the contrary and I'll take this off and show you you can take these out and index them into you know one of six positions so one set of soft jaws although a little bit you know bigger and bulkier get me potentially six sets you know I can handle six sets of parts if I need to index those around you know be careful about how they're marked etc and just a lot more versatility now granted if you had a big part here and you indexed it you can't really put another big part here or you cut into that previous one looks like what I did was cut some slots some snug-fitting slots and a key on the top of that jaw should turn this around a bit in addition to the key a little counterbore and I think I probably press fitted or lock cited a little locating bushing in and there's two spots on the jaw that have the equivalent sort of the countersink in the threaded hole so I can mount these in one of two positions there it is and then I can tighten it down for for larger work again you take these out index to the next one and put it back on screw it down and you'd have a sort of a fresh soft jaw just get that back on then once those were back on it looks like I just did a facing cut to get these all in the same plane you'd still see a little low spot here alright just do a quick counter bore and mount this part and see how it works so maybe just to state the obvious when you're cutting these forms in your soft jaws in this case it's just a you know straight counter board with the stop so I have a little material sticking out to actually keep working on this part to face it you don't want to make it the exact same size as your part so if this is a this is 20 millimeter OD if I cut that 20 millimeter I'm not gonna be able to tighten these soft jaws onto the part so I'm going to have to make that a little bit undersized you know so that I can open the jaws put the part in and tighten down on it and be able to repeat that position reasonably and get some good gripping power on the part in this case I'm not too concerned about concentricity I just want that depth to be consistent you know across all 16 of these parts all right there's the finished counterbore I just went in there with a boring bar small boring bar so I couldn't quite get the camera in and around this close to film that while was happening nothing very exciting Depp was in critical and I kept at about 20,000 the hold so now it's works like this I take my part you know I've faced off one side maybe or cut off open that up a hair I should be able to get that down tighten it up and then I'll have my the carriage in you know and locked so I'm coming over and I'm doing the same facing cut in the same position I could just swap parts in and out so for that I don't know 10-minute investment in setting up the soft jaws and cutting that location I can now breeze through 16 parts like nobody's business all right again not rocket science but maybe somebody found that interesting until next time you

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 315,646

Rating: 4.9749107 out of 5

Keywords: turning, metalworking, soft jaws, lathe jaws

Id: iGw7gLNKM18

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 01 2014