Fred Holder wrote:
On Aug 4, 8:02 am, mac davis wrote:
I was looking at the escoulen chucks in woodturners catalog and thinking they
would be kinda fun...

Are they difficult to set up and use?

Do you need to spend $350 for the Deluxe or is the slightly less expensive
Standard ok for most stuff?

I sort of hate to invest a bunch of money on another toy that I end up not
using...

mac

Please remove splinters before emailing


Hello Mac,

I have both of the Escoulen Chuck, the Robert Sorby Eccentric Chuck,
and the Axminister Eccentric Chuck. They all allow you to do things
that are difficult to do with normal chucking systems. I personally
don't have enough imagination to fully use any of them. That said, you
can do stuff similar to the Escoulen Chuck with a standard chuck with
teeth in it like the Oneway chucks, but without the precision
adjustment of the Escoulen Chuck. You can also get the offset effect
of the Sorby and Axminister chucks with two pieces of wood mounted on
a faceplate and a lot of screws. Michael Werner just demonstrated this
at the Utah Woodturning Symposium in June. You can also get the
effects of the regular Escoulen Chuck by using a Ball Chuck like I use
for the Chinese Balls and holding a wooden ball in it with the
workpiece attached to the ball. Finally, you can do some awsome pieces
of eccentric turning between centers.

What I'm really saying is that it is not necessary to purchase one of
the eccentric chucks on the market to do eccentric turning. They do
make the task a bit easier and less fiddley. The $350 Escoulen Chuck
is a awsome piece of work and allows you to do many things, giving two
methods of eccentricity in in single chuck.

Fred Holder
http://www.fholder.com


I got the opportunity to obtain one of the Kelton eccentric faceplates
with an angle face plate and a balancer last year. It dwarfs the others
and permits mounting a regular 4 jaw chuck. My only problem is finding
the time to use it. (lots of ideas but only about 1 afternoon a week
to use the lathe) I've been studying the geometry of the possibilities
but only on paper. I've done a couple pieces to test it out but I'd
like to see what others have done (something besides odd candle sticks).

One of my test pieces was a hollow form but I discovered that it was too
small to place the opening too far off center