Stupid Four-Jaw Chuck Tricks

hello Internet my name is Quinn this is blondie hacks this is tips blitz 20 19 a group YouTube machinist collaboration started by Emma's spare room machine shops you should check out her channel the idea is that we all make quick videos about different things that we do in the shop little tricks that make our lives easier and we share them all with the hashtag tips blitz 19 so go ahead and click that hashtag down below to see all of the collaborators participating in this project and I am gonna do stupid 4 jaw Chuck tricks so let's go all right stupid 4 jaw trick number one is copper soft jaws you've probably seen these they're great for doing second operations where you have to clamp down on a machined surface that you don't want to ding up with the Chuck jaws and they're easy to make out of 24 gauge copper as you see here but this thin material it loses its shape easily and over time the Chuck jaws will chew through them and you have to make new ones so I'm going to show you how to make some new ones out of a 16 gauge copper that's much heavier and that will last a very long time now the most critical dimension is the width of the nose of each Chuck jaws you want to get that measurement down and you're going to put that measurement down on this little template here and you're going to work outward from there so next you're going to measure the 45-degree slope on each side and you're going to add that outboard on your template of the nose and then the last dimension is the side profile of each jaw and you also need 1/2 of the back and those two dimensions added up are going to form the last segment of our jaws so there's the side profile there and then the back you want to go a little less than half the width of the back because that's going to form this little tab that we're going to fold over and so that those two dimensions added up or your final segment so once you got that little template made then you can just mark that down on some 16 gauge copper sheet as you see here and there's lots of different ways to cut this if you have proper sheet metal tools a break would be the easiest way to do this but I don't once on using my bandsaw and this also works just fine I would not try to do this with like tin snips because it's going to distort the material too much so try to find some other way to do it and this is just one of those cheap 4x6 bandsaw setup in the vertical configuration and the tables on these things are really terrible but just clamp a piece of melamine or other smooth material in there and just push it into the saw a bit and makes it perfect zero clearance table for working with sheet metal and then we're going to use the template to mark the fold lines on the material and I'm just gonna use my vise and some channel locks to do the folding again if you had a press break or proper female tools this would be a lot easier but this works just fine it's important to start with that center section again the nose on the end of the jaw because that's the most critical one and so the first Bend is easy for the second Bend you can use a piece of angle iron in the vise to get the clearance that you need to make that Bend and you're trying to get again that 45-degree angle on the nose on the sides of the nose and then the width of the nose needs to match your Chuck jaws and get that as close as you can because everything else kind of depends on that being a good fit and then once you've got that then you can just use the Chuck jaw itself as a die effectively in device and just compress the copper around it like so and now we want to mark for the little tabs to fold over so you want to hold the copper a little bit below the surface of the jaws you want the Machine surface of the jaw to be proud of the copper and then just mark that and then you can snip this with some snips and then Bend those tabs over and you want those tabs to to not be overlapping or touching in the middle so trim them a little shorter with the snips if you need to because you need a little bit of a gap there and then that jaw fits on there like so now don't worry if the fit isn't perfect at this stage because we're gonna find to knit here in a moment so make three more of those and then we can install those on the four jaw and they should be a fairly snug fit so that they'll stay in place while you're manipulating the the jaws and next grab a piece of round stock and stick it in there and then clamp down on all four jaws good and tight and this is going to compress the copper and form it to the ends of our jaws and now this is going to help fine tune the fit so crank down on these guys really good and tight and compress that copper and that compression tends to flay out the sides and that's okay then we just come back in here with some channel locks and squeeze those copper jaws in again and once we've done this process now those jaws are going to be quite a good fit for each jaw they're going to match the shape of the jaw quite well and they will stay in place on their own from now on you can actually do this with the three jaw but it increases a lot of run out and you can't dial that run-out out like you can with the four jaw so it's really only useful for facing and stupid for draw trick number two is working with square stock now I'm sure you know of course you can hold square stock in a four jaw and face the ends and you've probably also seen the Turner's cube which is an exercise that lots of lathe operators do when they're learning is you know you can make a cube in the four jaw by facing each side but what if we want to face the long side of a piece of stock like this and it's too long to fit in our jaws what can we do well I'm going to show you how we can do this in the four jaw so we're going to start by facing the ends like you would with the Turner's cube and it doesn't actually matter if the part is concentric here because you're just facing the end and if like in this case the stock is too big to fit through the bore on your four jaw Chuck you may have to take very light passes and there's going to be a length limit on this because of course you're not going to be very rigid with a setup like this and annoyingly that tool is not on center so it left a little nub there and now here comes the stupid trick just go ahead and flip around two of the jaws and leave the other two in the normal position and I'm sure this is obvious and stupid but hey I warned you these tricks were stupid but I think this is something that a lot of beginners just don't think about that you don't have to have all four jaws in the same orientation you can flip around two of them or one of them or whatever you need to do to fit whatever weird piece of stock that you have and so once you've done that well now we can just face this guy off power cross feet is really useful here because facing this guy off is equivalent to facing off like a seven inch diameter part so it's going to take a little while and as you can see it leaves a very nice finish and I also fix the tool height and stupid for da trick number three what if I will now want to make a hole in this part in a in an arbitrary location you know I've done some layout and I got a spot right here and you know maybe this is like a crankshaft journal or it's an alignment pin so it needs to be very very square you want to do it on the lathe you know the drill press isn't gonna be good enough so can we do this without a mill yes we can we can do it on the Forge ah here's how so I'm gonna use those layout marks to feel for where the center is that I want to drill my hole and I'm going to Center punch that and I'm gonna send a punch it a couple of times get a nice deep Center there because that's gonna be important here now let's take another look at the forge ah we've got these jaws that move on tiny lead screws right there lead screws each of these pairs of jaws is giving you two axes of translations so the face of the four jaw is really a rotating frame of reference and you can use those jaws to move your part in space however you want I mean within a limited range of course so here's where the trick comes in yeah it's a dead center yeah you know what a dead center is right well you may have noticed but never thought too much about this guy back here is a center hole it's how they make these guys they're made between centers for precision but we can actually use that so I'm going to plant one end of the dead center in our nice deep center punch that we made and support the back of the dead center with my live Center using that Center and now what I can do is I just sort of visually use that dead center as a frame of reference to get the hole that we're trying to drill roughly centered in the Chuck on the axis of the lathe and you know I'm holding it with one hand here cuz I don't want this guy to fall while I do this you may have to back off the tailstock a little bit because as this guy straightens out of course it's going to need more space between the work and the tailstock once that guy is eyeballed in now we can bring in the dial indicator and we just dial this guy in like we would anything else and it looks pretty weird because the dead center isn't spinning like you're used to the thing you're dialing in spinning but it still works just fine it's still measuring the run-out as we spin the work and so as you spend the work the the dead center is kind of wobbling back and forth without turning but it's telling you what the run-out is at that point on the work and so you just dial this in like you would anything else and here you can see how well this works because the dead center is so precisely made it's actually quite easy to get it dialed in extremely well you know I've got it within a few tenths here and it didn't take long and so now we can go in with a center drill and just spot that Center punch and I'm gonna drill a quarter inch hole here for giggles and you can already see how the center hole is spinning on the axis of the lathe now there is going to be some vibration in the machine because this is you know a mass that's quite off-center so you may have to run a little slower than then you would like but you can still get the job done and there we have it perfectly squared hole drilled in an arbitrary place on this square piece of stock using nothing but the four jaw Chuck a quick note about doing this trick with round stock it does also work but there's more of a limit on your range of travel because as you can see the the jaws that are opposite the ones that you want to shift I can start to trap the piece on the edges and you can still manipulate them and get it dialed in but it does take more fiddling around but as you can see here we've managed to dial in this Center punch mark on the edge of this bore so this is a great trick for doing bolt circles and things like that on the lathe so I hope these stupid four draw tricks have shown you that if you're creative you can use the four jaw and the power of the lathe to do almost anything that the mill can do and this is why everybody says you should start with the lathe because it's true there really isn't much you can't make on the lathe if you're creative enough with your setups so hope you found this useful thank you very much for watching check out my patreon and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 121,414

Keywords: blondihacks, machining, machinist, abom79, this old tony, vintage machinery, steam, electronics, making, maker, hacking, hacker, lathe, mill, woodworking, workshop, shop, model engineering, engineer, engineering, live steam, machine shop, metal lathe, vertical mill, metalworking, metal shop, jewlery making, diy, home improvement, resin casting, how to, do it yourself, do it yourself (hobby), ASMR, mini mill, mini lathe, tipsblitz19, tipblitz19

Id: 00dl0DxRYvM

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 13 2019