Woodturning Chucks, Jaws, Tenon's and Recesses

welcome back to worth the effort woodworking yes today we are going to be talking about chucks all the variations in jaws you can get for them and the tenants and recesses that we use to hold our work along the way hopefully I will give you some tips on buying ideas different options you have different techniques for making both the tens and recesses and reasons why you might want to make one versus the other in certain situations so come along and let's make a mess now let's start off and tell you you do not need a chuck to would turn if you're just getting into wood turning you bought your first lay that came with a drive center a live Center so that you can turn between centers by squeezing the work in you can accomplish just about everything that kind of work holding and woodworking dates back to well before the Egyptian Age because we know that one because there's actually pictures on the Pyramid walls of people wood turning in that very manner and they've made bowls boxes all that kind of stuff all the way back then chucks are somewhat of a modern-day invention that we kind of stole the idea from metal woodworkers though most of the time they use a three jaw Chuck and we use a four jaw Chuck and these are called scroll chucks because there's some kind of mechanism on the inside that allows all four pieces of our wood turning Chuck we use four jaws to move in and out equally so that we can squeeze down on something and keep it centered and that ability opens up so much flexibility ease of grip and stuff like that that I'm going to contradict myself and say that getting a chuck is almost Amanda took men mandatory in this modern era for no other reason in that this is how we teach woodworking nowadays you don't see too many people other than maybe spring PO Turner's that kind stuff they're teaching the techniques for bowls and boxes of using just spindle drives or actually nails which are somewhat like face plates for holding woodwork a Chuck just opens up so much possibilities for learning techniques on your own because you can follow the instructions in books and magazines and YouTube videos and symposiums and most teachers out there gonna teach it using a Chuck so while it's not necessary in today's day and age it is somewhat necessary now what Chuck's to get is always a question I get asked in my standards response is get either a one-way or Vic mark now there are a lot of manufacturers out there right now but you gotta understand I live very very frugally I am a cheap man and even I will tell you this is something you want to splurge on get the best get the top-tier buy the Bugatti interior and Ferrari of the Chuck world because they will last you generations and that's been proven by the past generation of wood turns that just got into this because Vic mark in one way had been around long enough that pros have truly abused them and those pros are saying hey we're still using those original chucks that I bought whereas a lot of the alternatives out there they might be good they might be not you might be getting good one in the batch you might get a lemon but for some reason they are less money and these things take a lot of abuse and time and time again you see it on forums and stuff like that where they will buy one of these alternative brands and they mean if they say they're great wonderful and then in a few years are swapping him out for a one-way or a Vic mark just because they loosen up something something shifts they're just not working as well and plus these have been out long enough that if you are trying to save money you can get them on the used market all of these right here I bought on the used market so they had a lot of abuse to them now I'm going to tell you the demonstration I'm going to show you two is going to be on one-way chucks just because I went down that camp rug and all my accessories work across the board with these one-way chucks that I have it's kind of once you go in one family you're probably going to stick with it and they're good enough quality and you'll be there for a long time now as an example of the mechanics of the Chuck I'm going to use this one way now it's kind of confusing one way is a company it is also a model name of one of their models of chucks they have their small model which is called the one-way then they have a midsize model which they call the Talon and then they have their monster one which is called a stronghold and basically it comes down to size the capacity that they can hand hold stuff in to and the mass if you're turning a lot of big bowls obviously I would get a bigger chuck because it can just take a lot more pressure but then again I've turned some of the big bowls on my lathe the sixth I have a 16 inch lathe of that size just fine with this one it just all depends upon what kind of jaws you get on to attach to your Chuck and I will cover those in a second now most Chuck's are going to have a way to attach it to the lathe all the chucks I buy have an adapter that goes onto them so I if I ever changed my lathe to get another brand or something like that my Chuck can go with me in fact this has gone with me too through two different lays you just buy a different adapter that has different threads or sizing right here you can buy some chucks that are threaded a specific way and then buy you know something that screws into that that then will screws into your lathe but the more you do those kind of adapters it kind of diminishes the capacity of your chuck plus your farther and farther away from those bearings on your headstock so my opinion it's probably torquing on those a little bit more just wearing your lathe out a little bit more so just get one that goes right with it these are not much money and when I say they're not much money if a top tier chuck was a hundred bucks more than the next level down I would still say invest in the top tier chucks but generally I did some research right before it came here in the price difference is only 20 to 40 dollars if you compare an apples to apples over lifetime that is nothing plus the fact that you if anything does wear out or loosen up or something like that all these parts they've been around so long that you can buy parts for them fairly inexpensively though I've never had to really do anything to all the checks I use and frankly I kind of abuse them now when you get a chuck you're also gonna want to get some jaws and they attach to your chucks generally with screws and stuff like that though if you'll notice this one way these heavy slots right here they call those a safety slot and one of the the jaws it's going to have this little pin and what that does is it prevents you from moving the Chuck back and forth back and forth too far as it will limit it to travel somewhat a bit now a lot of chucks will advertise a long travel but you really shouldn't need too much of a travel you just need to be able to grip the tenon and you size the tenon for the jaws that you're using these right here are probably the most common size there are number three then they excuse me they're number two and then you can get a number three and a number four in these steel styles and the number fours are pretty much the biggest ones that I I have any use for and I don't see too many people getting bigger if you go bigger than this then you're using face plates or other kind of stuff you can also by physically larger chucks like number fives and stuff and they call these like jumbo jaws or something like that and they're made of aluminum and they're meant to squeeze the outside of a bowl and I will talk about their peculiarities in a second but they are not for heavy work they are just that last little bit for like removing a tenon or a recess then you're gonna find a lot of specialty jogs long spiggott jaws or all the kind of stuff it seems every year or something there's a new fad and jawed Chuck designs but for the most part if you were just making bowls box and stuff like that just get this standard kind of jaws now there are several different options when you get jaws these that you show right here are what they call serrated and profiled what that means is the inside of this is very parallel it's not dovetailed at all and you have these serrations on both the inside and on this outside lip can you see that I never know in the video okay well a jaw is designed to be able to either squeeze on a tenon or expand into recess the serrations you basically fit into whatever size you want and because they're these little triangles they will kind of compress the fibers a little bit and give you a lot of traction so it will grip it quite a bit coming out and the way they design these serrations they actually pull it in a little bit because the strength of any kind of joint whether a recess or a tenon is not necessarily how far deep the tenon goes but the contact with the shoulder of this Chuck right here that is where all your strength comes from so if it's able to squeeze it in a little bit you'll gain a little bit more strength the other size is what they call dovetail door smooth ones and you can see the shape of it is slightly dovetailed so that if you put a dovetail in there it will slide down and squeeze against the shoulder once again if you expand into the recess it will once again squeeze it down the other thing you need to consider in this is whether or not your jaws are going to be profiled and you can get some that are on profiled or not now when they make a set of jaws they actually make it out of a sole blank so that they are all going to be very concentric and then they saw them apart so in order to get the perfect circle you she do have to have a little bit of space in between them if you sent your jaw's together notice that is not a perfect circle in fact if you were to put a circle in there it would be touching on these four spots and it could slip because it doesn't have the ultimate grip the ideal size of any set of jaws is going to be the exact space that they separated out that exact circle because you will get contact all the way across now if you have your jaws a little bit of farther apart basically the circle is going to be contacting here here here and here and it will actually pinch into the wood quite a bit a lot of people get frustrated in that they might put something on one set a tenon then they reverse a piece and it doesn't it's not perfectly centered anymore that's because perhaps these are compressing a little bit different rate on different spots of the wood because wood is not a homogeneous medium it is not consistent if you're pinching and sapwood here and hardwood there obviously that's going to go into the wood a little bit more and this is offsetting your piece a little bit one way or the other but that won't you think about something else here what if I were to put in a square block which is something I commonly do in my chucks that square piece is going to be contacting on these eight points alone that isn't that that much strength and those points are really going to compress in the wood so when they make something that they call profile they're talking about this design right here and notice now whenever I spread it apart we notice see how these because they are now flat they're gonna be contacting that square quite a bit in fact that's how I do all of my my tops is I leave the blank square and notice all the contact that you're getting on the outside if you only had these right here it would only be pinching on the points so if you're going to be doing a lot of chucking up square stock granted there is no wiggle room here if you get a bad catch with this one you're gonna get a bad bad catch because this will continue turning the downside of this profile is that if you do do a lot of perfectly sized around Tenon's well you're not going to get as much contact with this design as you would with this style design if it's a slightly not perfect shape because now you're just contacting on these interior points of the circle not these exterior points and with this design there's those contact points are spread out a lot farther so they will give you more torque so to speak it's a secure hold on irregularly size Tenon's well I can see some of y'all saying well why would that be a big deal you should be turning your Tenon's to the optimum size for not only function but safety you want your chuck to work at their best that really isn't always an option especially if you're a bold Turner who twice or thrice turned stuff because you get a green piece of wood you turn it perfectly around get the nice with thick shake but evenly that and you stick it up to dry within weeks it's gonna warp here's an example I have this bow it was turned in 2014 and when it came off the lathe it was completely flat in a perfect circle it is not a perfect circle now neither is the tenon on it so whenever I reach up this up to return it to get the shape I want I've got to read this tenon in order to get it to fit into the Chuck now if I had sized it perfectly from the get-go when I return it it's now gonna be too small and I won't be able to put it on the chuck so on Greenwood a lot of times you want to turn them a quite a bit bigger to compensate for any future warp plus the fact that I find that these edges right here Greenwood will actually compress a lot easier than fully dried wood so if you have these corners biting into an oversized tenon well then I can get a better bite because these will actually compress into the wood that Tennant a tad bit more then if it was perfectly sized and just squeezing it and when you're rough turning stuff you're gonna get some vibration you're going to be hitting you know square corners you're turning a lot of air so your boom boom-boom-boom your compacting it so every few minutes or so you're always retightening your chuck a little bit allowing that to bite in a little bit more and after it gets a little bit of compression going on it just doesn't seem to need to be retightened as much whereas if you had it perfectly sized you would still be getting that compression but you're going to be constantly retightening a lot more often than if you were just getting those spikes from the corners in there because it's not squeezing those fibres as much and remember it's fibres only going to squeeze so far then they would really start pushing back this doesn't seem to hold it as well but then after the fact that whenever it Franks a little bit more he'll never go back into that Chuck where if it was oversize I could turn it down a little bit and it will fit in there just perfectly and that is the reason why I kind of have acquired these dovetailed straight non profiled large boat ones because whenever I turn bows I tend to get the biggest logs like in and then core them out and this gives me a little bit better bite into that green wood and I typically use these smaller serrated eyes for boxes and stuff like that because a lot of times that's already either kiln dried or stuff that's I dried here I'm not having to twice or thrice turn it's going straight to whatever shape I I have so that I don't have to deal with that compression as much and it's that compression in Greenwood why I prefer using a tenon as opposed to a recess when I'm roughing out the bowls at least that first monster sized one I like having that big tenon on it and that kind of comes to when do you use Tenon's and when do you use recesses a lot of it comes down to grain direction you see most of us when we are right you see most of us then you get a tree we cut up the tree in there are sections if we are doing in grain bowls or something like ingrained boxes which most boxes are turned in cream we are basically taking that tree turning it on its side and spinning it around this axis and in that situation the only thing you can do is use a tenant because a tree is very weak going along the grain if you've ever seen a person splitting firewood they stick it up on side the axe is it just kind of explodes / it's very strong going across grain very wheat going with the grain well if you have a recess in a piece of wood which is spreading it apart like that and the grain is running this way because you turn the tree on its side and rotating on the access it is going to want to split it right down that Center right along those grain pass it because that's the weakest aspect but if you had it in a tenant you're basically compressing the fibers so the block of wood with the grain running this way we're not split but a bowl turner or at least most boaters we don't turn the tree on its side rotate around the axis we basically take that tree just like that and we return to turn it end over in so the weakness of the grain is now running this way right along where that tenon is and I have had bowls break off that tenant and it only occurs when I'm being stupid when I'm turning a monster bowl with a very small tenon because I have too small of jaws on there which is why I had those big jaws so I can put a much bigger tin in there so there are more fibers holding the wood onto the blank and I will say this this has only happened to me on Greenwood Greenwood splits a lot easier so when you're roughing those out that's when that happened but on Greenwood a lot of people advocate on the monster size Bowl if you're coring out the centers on the biggest one to use a recess because with a recess you're coming in here you have all of this fiber on both sides to combat the wood splitting and even though you're pressing it out it's not in a splitting force so much whereas if you have a tenon you only have this much of whatever you are resisting the splitting action now why don't I do that one as my preferred method for the largest green bowls I turn because of a complete lack of ability and pure ignorance on my part as I'm trying the wood because I do not have what they call feeler gauges or something like that that would tell me the wall thickness I use my eyes to determine it my fingers and time nice a hole there nice little hole there notice a recess I so hole hole holes time and time again I blew out the bottoms of my other bowls that I use when I'm doing a recess on them and understand this is my inability because if I have a 10 inaudible well I can slide down my interior bowl design I can use my feet my fingers to feel when the wood separating and I can get the nice bottom of a bowl shape and when I'm done I simply flip the bowl and I turn off the tenon and many times you can put a little bead on there if you want a foot or if you don't want a foot you can actually turn it off and put a slightest of concave underneath there so that's sitting on the ends I just find that a lot easier but I'm sure some of y'all can see the problem if you have a recess and you're doing the same technique where you're feeling it well all of a sudden you have to get the bottom of the bowl a lot thicker in order to not blow it out and it makes it a little bit heavier in my mind and in turning it the curves don't quite match with me I prefer to have a little bit thicker up top just so it gives you a visual rim and then once I come down I'm using my fingers to determine where once again it's my technique why I keep blowing out the bottoms of a recessed bowl but there are times when you just have to do a recess on a bowl to make it work or that platter and the example is this blank right here now I did did get a little bit too dried for me so I'm going to split this and make smaller stuff ever but if I wanted to turn a nice 12 inch plate out of this if I were to turn off all that Matoo to put a tenon on it it would be worthless there's no there's not enough wood left and if you're buying stuff like a quarter or ten quarter wood from my hardwood dealer you are dealing with thinner stock so if you have a two-inch thick piece of wood that you want to make a nice platter out of and you put a tenon on it no you go in a quarter inch it doesn't have to be a huge tinning remember it's all in the shoulder that the of the shoulder but you now lost that much wood so you just can't make as nice a shape and then after all of that so you come in you make a nice little platter what you're now going to have to recess this a little bit more to so that your platter will fit sit flat on these two low points whereas if you started out with a recess you come in that same quarter-inch for the recess all of a sudden you can turn a much more volumous plate or platter maybe you do some kind of OG where it reverses like that and it can come down almost all the way to that recess on the shape and a lot of times what I would do when I'm done with it is I will reverse it and the center of the recess you don't have to have flatten you can do a dumb bear so that I can take off those those corners and make the underside part of the entire design so when you're doing long grain work a lot of times a recess will make sense now there's one piece of conventional wisdom that has never really kind of sat what would mean I don't understand the physics of it and it's for this reason remember earlier when I told you that people kind of tell you to use a recess when you're doing large green bowls because of all that contact patch it's less likely for the wood to split well here's the thing you have two different styles of jaws you have the smooth kind of dovetail one so that they will fit up in there and as you expand it out it's not sink it back down and then you had the serrated kind which are parallel but they have a little bit of a rim on the side that's going to compress those fibres to prevent it from pulling out so you basically have to do both of these you can turn them ever so slightly smaller you turn the recess in that position where the jaws are together so that that diameter or that circumference right there will fit either the expansion of the dovetails or that alliteration so it can slide into the hole and then expand out on the inside as it gets to the optimal setting which is you know just a little curve separated well if you're doing that with Greene and you know that it's going to shrink a little bit it doesn't give you as much wiggle room to resize that hole whenever you have to reach uh KITT up because you know trees don't necessarily shrink and height as much but they shrink in width quite a bit so it's going to be the hole the hole diameter you'll fit the the Chuckle fit in perfectly but then whenever it shrinks down this way you're going to have to turn away that excess a little bit so in effect you make actually will be making that recess a little bit too big and when you do that when you when you make a recess too big it's no longer touching all along the rim the outside it's only touching somewhat in the center because the curve of each one of those is less and obviously I'm exaggerating here so it just seems to me if you have to oversize that recess it's never going to work as well but that kind of makes sense when if you're using recesses for platters and stuff like that because for the most part in platters you're taking wood that has been dimension to you know a quarter or ten quarter and dried first and then doing it so you're not having to twice turn stuff it's this twice turn aspect where I get confused because people tell you enlarge stuff to use a recess but when you turn it again the recess isn't going to be as efficient and totally disagree with me on this and in the comments below leave your reasoning why just don't come call me an idiot tell me why I'm an idiot and a few last things I want to talk about when you're using these dovetail style jaws you kind of want to get that dovetail angle just right both the inside and the outside whether you're doing a recess or a tenon and a trick I did I've learned my dad taught me this one is go buy yourself a very cheap scraper because you're not gonna be using it for a lot of stuff and actually cut the angle use your grinding wheel or something like that and get that angle just right so that when you insert it in straight you can bring it over for the recess and get the perfect shape of your dovetail the angle is dead-on perfect and you can do the same thing to the outside but I find the outside a little bit easier because if I cut it a little bit narrow it's gonna squeeze and crush those fibers a little bit and they'll still locked it in that's those recesses where you just gotta get that angle right and a scraper sized to your jaws sure does make life a lot easier now those are the main jobs you're gonna be using but there are some accessories that go with a lot of these coming back to these jumbo jaws sets and how they work is they actually squeeze down on a bowl or if you have something that is a like a vase you can squeeze out a little bit but you have to be very careful with these jumbo jaws operate off the idea that they are squeezing down on the bowl and these rubber stoppers will kind of compress a little bit to give it some traction so that Bowl will not pop off and this is a very precarious traction you do not want to take off huge amounts of material with this one this is really tiny tiny cuts just to remove a move what was ever on the bottom of the bowl whether cleaning up the recess or totally removing that tenon because what I found is this angle right here whenever you stick a bowl up there you have to get the rim of whatever you're doing up underneath this angle so that that corner right there will really compress and hopefully you will slightly touch right there and it will press it against the faceplate what happens is if you have any kind of like rim or something like that where this is more straight well it's not dovetailed in and there's a lot there's a good chance it will pop out but I have those kind of situations I make sure that when I have the bowl and I'm turning away the tenon turning away the tenon I have my cone of my tail stock in there and I will turn away all this stuff right here but I will leave that cone to remove with a knife a chisel and a little bit sandpaper I do not take away that tailstock whereas if I'm doing anything else with another style rim that's gonna fit up underneath that rubber stopper I will remove the majority of it and for that last little cone I would remove the tailstock and just smooth it out so when you're using these jumpers just just be careful I've had more bowls come out of the Jumbo jaws than anything other thing out there luckily at this stage they're all pretty pretty lightweight plus pack at this stage you know that would sometimes pop up I didn't find out I had it this thin until I was ahead up there and I was going to turn up reshape this recess and then I showed on Instagram the end result now some other quick things about these jaws a lot of times they go on my lathe and they never come off that's why I like this stronghold it just goes on in there and it doesn't mean I can no longer turn between sinners or stuff like that because these will hold a lot more things other than just Tenon's and recesses at one side note I don't know if this is spreading falsehoods are wet by I'm told that whenever you put your jaw's in there put the screws in but leave them fairly loose right now and then tighten it up ever so slightly so that they cinch together and then you might need to play around with them to get them perfectly in that circle and at that point time tighten them all up because I'm told that that gets make sure that they are locked dead center otherwise one might be ever so slightly off and it's not necessarily the jaws that might get slightly off it's the positioning of the scrolling mechanism now that might be total BS I'm not sure but I've gotten in the habit of doing that one so I'd do it now but the thing about you know once you get into one brand of chucks even if you have multiple layers and multiple chucks they will interact with the accessories that go with them for example I am constantly placing in a live Center into both of these and it'll work with all the one weight chucks and it's got little gaps in here so it will just fit in there very nicely so if you want to use a screw drive you can and it will sink on in there now if you're using a screw drive I do recommend using the biggest jaws you got for the simple reason that once again the strength of the screw the jaws is the contact with the rim so if you had a screw draw sinking it in sinking it into that shoulder if it's the narrower shoulder it doesn't have as much strength as a wide shoulder now wide shoulder just has a lot more surface area and any rocking will give a lot more force so if you're using screw draws make sure you use the largest if you're using a screw thread make sure you use the largest jaws you have that will work with the size of blank you have wood black you have and you can also do something similar with your driver but you don't really have to worry about the shoulder there because it's just going to protrude along the side and then you turn it between centers I love this setup because many times when I have a log I will start between drive centers between centers I will round it out I will turn the ten in and then I can take this out and put the tenon in here without having to remove the Chuck in fact this Chuck right here pretty much lives on my 16 inch lathe well I hope I was able to convey to you the advantages of using a Chuck in the specifics of things like jaws and stuff like that it all comes down to physics and dealing with grain direction very common theme and woodworking well I hope you enjoyed this video and if you did please do me a favor like favorite subscribe do all those social medias visit my website Worth effort com where I have a lot of t-shirts wags and stuff like that and also information about patronizing me in different ways and after all said and done I want you to remember one last thing that it is always worth the effort to learn create stuff and share it with others y'all be safe and have fun

Channel: wortheffort

Views: 68,380

Keywords: wortheffort, woodturning, wood turning, woodworking, wood working, chuck, lathe, jaw, oneway, vicmark, stronghold, barracuda, nova, supernova, record, grizzly, holding, tenon, recess, infinity, ez, wood, dovetail, serrated, spigot, apprentice, talon, vicmarc, easy wood, DIY, learn, craft, maker

Id: qO9xi5xd5NE

Length: 36min 53sec (2213 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2019