"mac davis" wrote: (clip) I sort of hate to invest a bunch of money on
another toy that I end up not using...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I watched Escoulen demo his chuck, and I must say two things:
1.) The chuck is really elegant.
2.) His work is so weird I am not interested in buying a chuck to do what
he does.

So I made an inexpensive substitute. I turned a vacuum chuck which has a
large concave spherical surface. I can hold my work off axis, out to the
edge of the gripping surface. I did a couple of oddball things with it, and
then lost interest.

It has one important advantage over Escoulen's chuck. When the wood is
tilted off-axis, it spins in a conical orbit. Escaulen's wood has the tip
of the cone at the chuck end, and the free end of the wood is spinning in a
circle. My wood has the tip of the cone ON AXIS, where it can be supported
by the live center. The large end of the cone is held in the vacuum chuck,
so both ends of the work are supported.

An advantage of Escoulen's chuck is that it gives you measured and
reproducible offset settings--my crude system doesn't have that.