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help in building a vacuum chuck

A

allen jay

Joined
Dec 8, 2009
Messages
108
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Location
Littleton, CO
I recently acquired a vacuum pump and am wondering what does a guy need to do to set this thing up for use?
What additional parts are required etc etc etc.
Can i build my own chucks??
Please help?
 
Allen There was a really good article covering all of that stuff in American Woodturner about 6 to8 years ago. If you are an AAW member you can access all of the issues online. I have not played with it to see if it has a search feature. I'm on my second vacuum system and built them both based on info from those articles. I have a PDF at home that is a drawing of how I set up my system and how I built my first vacuum connector and my vacuum chucks. If you will send an e-mail to johnclucas@charter.net I'll forward that to you. It might help.
 
Allen, I am going to assume you have a hollow head-stock

You need to bring the vacuum through the head-stock, that can be done with a 3/8 npt pipe, like used for making lamps. You need a valve and bleed assembly on the vacuum pump end and a good seal on the other end.

The tricky bit is something needs to rotate, while holding a good seal. I used a Holdfast adapter (available at Craft Supplies and Packard, among probably others)

The chuck can be easy. A face plate screwed to a goodly chunk of MDF. Drill a hole in the center of the MDF, Cut a grove in the MDF, sized to hold either a 3 inch or 4 inch waste (plumbing waste) coupler. Glue this in place. Glue a gasset like "foam" on the outside edge of the coupler (like bits of a mouse pad)

Hope this is some help (there are some great books and web-sites that explain this much better then I did)

TTFN
Ralph
 
There are several past American Woodturner articles on building and using a vacuum chuck. Here's a screen-shot from our online searchable database:
 

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