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Turning Stummels

Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2016 11:19 pm
by hutchpipes
Folks

I'm a new pipe maker trying to teach myself how to turn on a lathe. I'm having trouble rechucking and realigning in my jaws if I remove the block before turning.

I am using Steve's Jaws. My holes are lining up nicely but if I take the block out of the jaws, I just can't ever get it lined back up to do my turning. It ALWAYS wobbles.

How do you guys who drill on a press line your stummels up on the lathe to be in line with your airways and bowls when you https://vimeo.com/151471760turn them?

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2016 11:50 pm
by Ocelot55
Don't remove the block from the chuck unless every operation you need performed on that axis is completed. This means facing, drilling, and turning. If you have to chuck it up again it will never be 100% accurate.

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2016 12:10 am
by hutchpipes
So those guys who drill on the press just get a wobble?

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2016 12:23 am
by DocAitch
I just posted my method of drilling on a press in the "Tools" sub forum. No wobble.
DocAitch.

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2016 1:04 am
by sandahlpipe
The only way you can rechuck your work reliably is if you have pins on the jaws. But you can probably find a way not to need to remove the briar while you're on one axis.

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2016 3:43 am
by Massis
the question is: if you have a lathe that can spin briar, why not drill on that?

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2016 5:10 am
by caskwith
As mentioned above, do everything you need to do on that axis before re-positioning and you won't have any trouble.

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2016 11:04 am
by Sasquatch
Few things here....

It's dead easy to re-chuck. When you have the block chucked, take a sharp pencil and trace the jaws. Make a mark on one jaw, just a dot or paint or a piece of tape. Mark that also on the block.

Now you can take the thing apart and put it back in the same spot in about 2 seconds. And if the jaws have teeth, they'll find the old grooves when you get it "close enough".

One of the things I do is drill my chamber half way when I am shaping. Then I do all kinds of other stuff including the airway and mortise and then I'll go back and finish the chamber. Just stuff the block onto the chucked chamber bit and insert the whole thing back into the jaws and clamp it... again lining up multiple times is no trouble at all.


The one caveat in all this is that having squared up blocks makes all this stuff easy. If you are working with crooked lumps, best of luck to you.

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2016 4:29 pm
by LatakiaLover
I'm afraid Sas is being a bit disingenuous, here.

When da shit don't fit, he just snarls and bends the offending lathe parts with his Sasquatch hands.

(There's a reason he lives on the outskirts of a semi-remote Canadisian town, people. :roll: )

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2016 6:23 pm
by caskwith
Sasquatch wrote:Few things here....

It's dead easy to re-chuck. When you have the block chucked, take a sharp pencil and trace the jaws. Make a mark on one jaw, just a dot or paint or a piece of tape. Mark that also on the block.

Now you can take the thing apart and put it back in the same spot in about 2 seconds. And if the jaws have teeth, they'll find the old grooves when you get it "close enough".

One of the things I do is drill my chamber half way when I am shaping. Then I do all kinds of other stuff including the airway and mortise and then I'll go back and finish the chamber. Just stuff the block onto the chucked chamber bit and insert the whole thing back into the jaws and clamp it... again lining up multiple times is no trouble at all.


The one caveat in all this is that having squared up blocks makes all this stuff easy. If you are working with crooked lumps, best of luck to you.

Any reason for the half chamber drilling?

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2016 7:38 am
by Charl
Like Chris and others, I never take the block out of the jaws unless all the work needed on that axis is done. On my wobbly stummel dedicated lathe, there is no chance of it getting back in the exact right spot. And btw, my jaws do have pins.

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2016 9:59 am
by Joe Hinkle Pipes
with steves jaws torque the hell out of it when you chuck it up. the deeper the the grooves bite the easier it is to line back up. Also what Todd suggested will help a lot. I found when using those jaws I could rechuck easily if i marked which jaw was on which side of the block and always rechuck the same jaw to the same side. You can tighten it up until the jaws just grab, then wiggle the block back and forth. As you wiggle and tighten it will drop back into the old grooves.

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2016 11:10 am
by Sasquatch
caskwith wrote:
Any reason for the half chamber drilling?

There's a bunch of reasons, whether or not you find any of them compelling is another thing.

The biggest thing is that when I drill for keeps, I want to be drilling the chamber down onto the already drilled airway. This allows for micro-adjustments in depth. I never, ever, ever, drill the airway hoping to hit the chamber just right. So I need the airway first.

I do NOT drill my airway first thing in the process because althought I have the pipe roughly sawn and have some idea where it's going to wind up, I really feel that I need to cut the bowl first. The grain, the size, the proportions of the pipe, this is all bowl stuff. So I work that end until I'm happy, then I spin the block and do facing, mortise, and airway, in that order.

Then I re-chuck it and finish drilling the chamber. On difficult shapes, I will use this secondary drilling to cheat, and angle the chamber just a hair toward the shank-side, allowing a really nice looking connection of airway and chamber on very bent pipes (like an LC or a calabash shape). Talking 5 degrees here but that can be the critical 5.

Re-chucking to finish the chamber can be accomplished with zero wobble if you have a tight fit on the drill bit and/or mark the block well. Or if you open up the chamber by hand, just a mm or two, then that tiny bit of wobble just doesn't matter, you aren't hitting anything important and if the last 1/2" of the chamber is 1 mm crooked it just doesn't show.

So my process is stupid and tedious, but it leads to best proportioning with maximum flexibilty on things like billiards, and it never leaves me with wonky drilling, and it allows some creepy little cheats that I employ pretty often on difficult shapes. It's actually analogous to drilling freehand, if you want to think of it that way, and my original hole is simply a fairly elaborate pilot.

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2016 11:27 am
by sandahlpipe
Sas,

It sounds like the rechucking you do is not without wobble, just without visible wobble on the finished product. If you tried to line up, say, the mortise because you forgot to drill it deep enough, you'd have a noticeable wobble no matter how long you sat there trying to line it up. Now I've not had a chuck with pins, just the briar jaws from Steve. But I have tried the whole marking along the jaws on both sides thing and tediously lining up the mortise for a half hour trying to get out the wobble and ended up satisfied with a very small wobble. The bottom line is, you're weird. :lol:

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2016 2:23 pm
by caskwith
Sasquatch wrote:
caskwith wrote:
Any reason for the half chamber drilling?

There's a bunch of reasons, whether or not you find any of them compelling is another thing.

The biggest thing is that when I drill for keeps, I want to be drilling the chamber down onto the already drilled airway. This allows for micro-adjustments in depth. I never, ever, ever, drill the airway hoping to hit the chamber just right. So I need the airway first.

I do NOT drill my airway first thing in the process because althought I have the pipe roughly sawn and have some idea where it's going to wind up, I really feel that I need to cut the bowl first. The grain, the size, the proportions of the pipe, this is all bowl stuff. So I work that end until I'm happy, then I spin the block and do facing, mortise, and airway, in that order.

Then I re-chuck it and finish drilling the chamber. On difficult shapes, I will use this secondary drilling to cheat, and angle the chamber just a hair toward the shank-side, allowing a really nice looking connection of airway and chamber on very bent pipes (like an LC or a calabash shape). Talking 5 degrees here but that can be the critical 5.

Re-chucking to finish the chamber can be accomplished with zero wobble if you have a tight fit on the drill bit and/or mark the block well. Or if you open up the chamber by hand, just a mm or two, then that tiny bit of wobble just doesn't matter, you aren't hitting anything important and if the last 1/2" of the chamber is 1 mm crooked it just doesn't show.

So my process is stupid and tedious, but it leads to best proportioning with maximum flexibilty on things like billiards, and it never leaves me with wonky drilling, and it allows some creepy little cheats that I employ pretty often on difficult shapes. It's actually analogous to drilling freehand, if you want to think of it that way, and my original hole is simply a fairly elaborate pilot.

That totally makes sense, not something that I do since my drilling is done in a different order but if it works for you then cool, certainly can't argue with your results.

Re: Turning Stummels

Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2016 9:24 pm
by Sasquatch
sandahlpipe wrote:Sas,

It sounds like the rechucking you do is not without wobble, just without visible wobble on the finished product. If you tried to line up, say, the mortise because you forgot to drill it deep enough, you'd have a noticeable wobble no matter how long you sat there trying to line it up. Now I've not had a chuck with pins, just the briar jaws from Steve. But I have tried the whole marking along the jaws on both sides thing and tediously lining up the mortise for a half hour trying to get out the wobble and ended up satisfied with a very small wobble. The bottom line is, you're weird. :lol:

Sure, re-chucking at a usable tolerance for shaping, drilling, etc is not quite the same as rechucking at .001", although that can be done too, with a couple tries, usually. The block is happier where it has previously been chucked than anywhere else, put it that way. But no, I would never try to re-chuck something to get a slightly deeper mortise at exactly .250". Gotta get that shit right in one shot!