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Northfield chucks


chris m
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Good morning

 

I have an extremely low-distortion lathe chucking application that I am discussing with several manufacturers and like what I am hearing from Northfield, but have no direct experience with them. Are any of you good folks using their chucks? How do you feel about them? I am particularly interested in how well the jaws repeat when you remove them from the chuck and reinstall; they claim that the soft jaws repeat .0001 when removed and reinstalled, but I have a hard time buying that.

 

C

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Chris,

 

I have looked into these but have not used them. They do look well built.

 

quote:

they claim that the soft jaws repeat .0001 when removed and reinstalled, but I have a hard time buying that.


Get it in writing and test it, that is the only way you will know.

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Do you need to skim the jaws, or is that just the standard practice? Our application is simple, but relatively difficult; we're boring an existing part that is relatively light and subject to workholding distortion, roundness under .0002 and concentricity to OD (which we're gripping on) under .0004. Currently we use a very expensive collet system, which works very well performance-wise, but is very costly and cumbersome to set up. Changeover time is nearly [1] hour currently and I need to drive it down to [15] minutes maximum, which is one of the reasons I am looking at a quick-change jaw chuck.

 

C

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i would say its 50-50. We run around 1000 pcs a week thru it. We change jaws once or twice a month at most. Its held up very well and our chuck is probably 10 years old. Its been a production chuck for 3 years or so. Before that it was our prototype hard turning chuck.

 

We are happy with it.

 

hth

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I probably have [20] Kitagawa chucks; [2] of them the "QB" style quick-change. They make a nice chuck, but aren't really the place to go for what I'm looking for in this application; we have tiny little retrofit cylinders actuating our QB-306 chucks and they would still distort these parts too much.

 

Thanks for the suggestions and info guys; I'll let you know what I decide and what the results are in a few months.

 

C

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  • 1 month later...

Realise it's a bit late but I work in a shop with 30 spindles and they all use Northfield quick change air chucks. They are do have good repeatablity when used exactly correct. If you do not use the jaws exactly as suggested then you will have to reskim the jaws every time. We have no control here and for a 5 tool job it takes 2.5 - 3 hours for a setup. Stick with the collets. I wish we had them.

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