I bought a Sanou K27-80 independent 4 jaw chuck to use in a Kitagawa 3 jaw 10" to hold small die tools. The tooling has tight tolerances for concentricity & parallelism .0002" max, we are CBN hard turning and polishing. Not happy with the quality of the little chuck, its junky the Jaws are sloppy and raise a bit during tightening. I don't mind spend money, and don't have time to make it myself. Who is making a small high quality chuck & hard/soft jaws? Finished tools are being checked on a CMM.
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Looking for a small precision 4 jaw independent chuck (3"or4") Recommendations?
- Thread starter BOB-OO
- Start date
- Replies 4
- Views 343
implmex
Diamond
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2002
- Location
- Vancouver BC Canada
Hi BOB-00:
Believe it or not, I've been pretty lucky with the 4 jaw chucks from...Sherline of all places.
I just bought one to go on a customer's 5 axis setup (a TRT 100 on a Haas DT-2...not exactly a precision platform but more than good enough for their use
Back to the Sherline chuck...you DID say "small".
This thing is about 3.1' diameter and stands about 1.8" tall including the jaws.
In addition to the above use, I run one on my spin grinder and I can set up within a tenth just like I can on any other 4 jaw chuck.
A couple of things: the chuck body is Leadloy so it rusts if you even look at it wrong, but the jaws are O-1 and they are hard...I'm guessing 60+ Rockwell C.
Both of mine have been nice and tight, and nicely made.
Bonus...the last one I bought cost me a whopping $149.00 USD direct from Sherline...the air freight up to Canuckistan cost me as much as the chuck did.
That was a couple of months ago.
Cheers
Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com
BTW, if you're looking for something a bit bigger than this wee thing, I have 4 jaw Bison that's about 6" diameter.
It's a good chuck too, but I bought it maybe 25 years ago, so I cannot vouch for Bison's quality now.
On a last note, I've never been able to find a chuck that will let me dial in a part concentric right at the jaws and still have it concentric several inches away from the jaws.
So for stuff that needs to be really good, I've taken to putting copper between the jaws and the work.
On the Sherline that's on the grinder I wired a pair of cross pockets into the jaws front and back, to accept a bit of 10 gauge copper wire, so it's just protruding from the jaw surface by 0.010".
That way I can just shove bits of electrical wire into those cross pockets and I don't need eight hands to get everything into the chuck.
The very narrow contact patch allows me to tap the part into alignment, so I use the jaws to get the end closest to them to dial in that end, and then I use a knocker to bring the outboard end in too.
Of course, I'm only grinding with that setup so I don't need to reef the piss out of the chuck like I would if I was doing heavy turning on a big workpiece sticking out a mile.
It's made my life a lot easier putting those little round pockets into the jaws and it does zero damage to the chuck.
The mashed wires can be a bit of a bitch to remove though, that's what a good hand with a pencil grinder is for, or if you know exactly where they are in relation to the jaw faces you can just set them up on the Bridgeport and poke a tiny cutter down into the pockets.
MC
Believe it or not, I've been pretty lucky with the 4 jaw chucks from...Sherline of all places.
I just bought one to go on a customer's 5 axis setup (a TRT 100 on a Haas DT-2...not exactly a precision platform but more than good enough for their use
Back to the Sherline chuck...you DID say "small".
This thing is about 3.1' diameter and stands about 1.8" tall including the jaws.
In addition to the above use, I run one on my spin grinder and I can set up within a tenth just like I can on any other 4 jaw chuck.
A couple of things: the chuck body is Leadloy so it rusts if you even look at it wrong, but the jaws are O-1 and they are hard...I'm guessing 60+ Rockwell C.
Both of mine have been nice and tight, and nicely made.
Bonus...the last one I bought cost me a whopping $149.00 USD direct from Sherline...the air freight up to Canuckistan cost me as much as the chuck did.
That was a couple of months ago.
Cheers
Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com
BTW, if you're looking for something a bit bigger than this wee thing, I have 4 jaw Bison that's about 6" diameter.
It's a good chuck too, but I bought it maybe 25 years ago, so I cannot vouch for Bison's quality now.
On a last note, I've never been able to find a chuck that will let me dial in a part concentric right at the jaws and still have it concentric several inches away from the jaws.
So for stuff that needs to be really good, I've taken to putting copper between the jaws and the work.
On the Sherline that's on the grinder I wired a pair of cross pockets into the jaws front and back, to accept a bit of 10 gauge copper wire, so it's just protruding from the jaw surface by 0.010".
That way I can just shove bits of electrical wire into those cross pockets and I don't need eight hands to get everything into the chuck.
The very narrow contact patch allows me to tap the part into alignment, so I use the jaws to get the end closest to them to dial in that end, and then I use a knocker to bring the outboard end in too.
Of course, I'm only grinding with that setup so I don't need to reef the piss out of the chuck like I would if I was doing heavy turning on a big workpiece sticking out a mile.
It's made my life a lot easier putting those little round pockets into the jaws and it does zero damage to the chuck.
The mashed wires can be a bit of a bitch to remove though, that's what a good hand with a pencil grinder is for, or if you know exactly where they are in relation to the jaw faces you can just set them up on the Bridgeport and poke a tiny cutter down into the pockets.
MC
Last edited:
Thank you Marcus, order placed. I will do exactly as you suggested the little round pockets are a terrific idea!
These are little hard CPM10V parts .75" round x .65" L and I'm removing .007-.0095" with CBN so no need to crank'em and they won't be stick out much. Hunting for tenths doesn't mix well w cheap amazon purchases, but my local liquor store is happy. I also bought the master jaw set with replaceable upper softies. Thanks for sharing, I appreciate you! Will report back on quality next week.
These are little hard CPM10V parts .75" round x .65" L and I'm removing .007-.0095" with CBN so no need to crank'em and they won't be stick out much. Hunting for tenths doesn't mix well w cheap amazon purchases, but my local liquor store is happy. I also bought the master jaw set with replaceable upper softies. Thanks for sharing, I appreciate you! Will report back on quality next week.
implmex
Diamond
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2002
- Location
- Vancouver BC Canada
Hi BOB-00:
That's great news...I was hoping you'd be happy.
Cheers
Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com
That's great news...I was hoping you'd be happy.
Cheers
Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com