Collet chuck

[bensoelberg]

I have a Nova G3 chuck with pin jaws. I know that most of you who drill on the lathe use a collet chuck. Is it absolutely necessary or could I use my pin jaws while drilling?

 

[Russianwolf]

if it's a self centering chuck, then it's workable. the collet chucks work a little better since they grab all the way around, but you need to turn the blank nearly round to work in them. The scroll chuck will take square blanks, but since more of the blank is unsupported, it can get a little out of whack at times.

 

[Mack C.]

I have a Nova G3 chuck with pin jaws.

I know that most of you who drill on the lathe use a collet chuck. Is it absolutely necessary or

could I use my pin jaws while drilling?

I use a Oneway Talon chuck with Spigot Jaws to do 99% of my drilling on the lathe. I'm not aware of your Nova G3 with the pin jaws, but I'm imagining that to be similar to my Oneway with Spigot jaws, so my answer would be yes! Have you tried it. You'll never know until you have.

 

[ssajn]

I have a Nova G3 with pin jaws I use for drilling and rarely have a problem. I do not turn my blanks round before drilling.

 

[soligen]

I'm getting a nova chuck for XMAS, so will eb wanting to try this too. I think it will work, but for pen turning, if you can have only one chuck, get the collet chuck becasuse you can drill on it and also use it to hold finished pens, manrels, or just about anything under 3/4" diameter.

 

[KenV]

The answer is yes you can get a pretty good result.

The runout on my scroll chuck is about 3-4 times that of the collet chuck, so you are not getting the same precision. Collet chuck measures about 0.002 to 0.003 -- drill chuck is about 0.005 and the scroll chuck is 0.011.

Scroll chuck works best when the material is mostly inside the pin jaws (vs holding on the end with the rest hanging out.

I find that if I turn a stub tenon with a square shoulder and use the tail stock to align and fit the blank - then tighten the scroll chuck, I have a fair chance of gettiing away with a fair bit of cantilever hanging out of the jaws.

 

[tool-man]

I do this (what KenV said) all the time when drilling on the lathe. No need to round the piece entirely. If the material is hard or burly, I will start the hole with a center drill and then switch to a regular drill to finish. I should point out my scroll chuck jaws have an aggressive serrated inside biting surface.

I find that if I turn a stub tenon with a square shoulder and use the tail stock to align and fit the blank - then tighten the scroll chuck, I have a fair chance of gettiing away with a fair bit of cantilever hanging out of the jaws.

 

[PenMan1]

As usual, Ken has you covered. Good advice!

 

[jskeen]

The quick answer is Absolutely! You can use that until you get to the point where you want something different badly enough to buy that too There are some situations where a scroll chuck is the only solution, and others where a collet chuck would be MUCH better, but for the most part, you can do most blanks with either, just depending on how much prep you want to do. The only think that I absolutely can't do with my scroll chuck is to recrimp drilled bullets into the casings. You either need a reloading press or a collet chuck for that. If you want to drill irregular or odd shaped blanks, the scroll is your best bet. If you want to drill a segmented blank absolutely dead center, a collet will minimize your "oops" bucket contributions quite a bit.