How to keep chuck jaws organized?

[SlaveCam]

The problem with working with lathes equipped with a three-jaw chuck is that all the jaws tend to occupy all the possible free space after a certain period. I started labeling the jaws a year ago with alphabetics and maintain an openoffice spreadsheet which shows the diameters of both ends and whether internal or external clamping is used (or both). Is there any jaw database software that allow to define jaw geometry as well easily?

[Machineguy]

It's called EXCEL.

[jlw™]

At a former employer we had a "peg board" rack. Heavy duty, home made peg board that was about perfect. Then it had a 3 ring binder on a bank pen chain with a log. You signed them out/in and assigned new ones as needed. It worked like magic.

[Watcher]

Not an option but just sharing, Edgecam has a fixture manager where you can define chucks and jaws and reverse and interchange them quite easily.

[JAMMAN]

I number mine and put on the print which number jaws go with which project. Some of my jaws are bored at an angle to match castings so there is no particular diameter.

 

Different lathes have different prefixes, but hopefully I will never have 100 jaw sets for any machine or it wrecks the magic.

 

Mazak starts with 1

Mori 1 starts with 001

Doosan starts with 101

[SlaveCam]

We had over 100 jaws lying around at one time. Fortunately no longer. I don't number the jaws to avoid confusion with the jaw - master jaw order. But alphabetics ran out a while ago, now using "AA", "AH"...