...the G3 is a good chuck, however the pin jaws suck, they are out of round, we indicated a set and one was .065 thicker than most and one was .030 thicker 2 were with in .010
But the number 2 jaws are great as are the larger sets.
Forgive me if I'm de-railing the thread, but it's interesting that you say this.
My Nova G3 showed up in the mail earlier this week. I opened it up, installed the spigot jaws according to the directions, and hit the go-switch. It didn't look to be spinning true. Next, I chucked up a brad point bit and watched it. There appeared to be a double point on the end of the spinning bit, so I broke out the dial indicator. Here is what I found:
I attached the base of the dial indicator to the way tubes. I rotated the quill through a couple revolutions by hand and recorded the max deflection of the needle, adding the positive and negatives to get the full window.
Bare quill: less than 0.001"
Bare G3 adapter on the quill that the chuck threads onto: 0.0015"
Shaft of a forster bit chucked in the G3 internal jaws: 0.005" - the point of the forster bit appears steady when rotating under power
Shaft of a forster bit chucked in the G3 spigot jaws: 0.016" - the point of the forster bit does not appear steady when rotating under power
I have not been able to find stated or advertised tolerances for the Nova G3 - only advertisements that claim it is a "precision" tool. In my mind, a tool advertised as "precision" should be better than 16 thousandths of an inch. Did I receive a bad set of spigot jaws, or is this normal?
And on a slightly different tack, a guy named David Reed Smith has a great writeup on making a set of jaw inserts to hold pen blanks more accurately:
Auxiliary Pen Blank Jaws