Quick Wood Lathe Chucks - Wood and Glue

Wood lathes have been around so long that pictures of them can be found on the walls of Egyptian pyramids. During the thousands of years that we have been using them, various ways of holding work on the lathe have been developed. One such for faceplate work is the glue and paper joint but modern glues have made it even better.

Both the old style and the new start the same way. A piece of scrap wood is screwed to a faceplate and turned round and flat. Now a piece of wood suitable for a bowl or platter is selected. For consideration purposes, let us assume it is for a platter.

A piece is selected that is deep enough for securing to a faceplate with short screws. This is done to the top of the piece. First the outside is turned round and the bottom is turned flat. While the piece turns a pencil is used to make a ring the size of the scrap wood on the faceplate.

The old method of using the chuck involved gluing a piece of craft paper to the waste wood and then to the platter blank, carefully centering the chuck in the pencil lines. A clamp or weight was put on the assembly, making sure it did not shift, and it was left for at least eight hours to dry before being remounted on the lathe. Once the top was turned the chuck was removed by inserting a chisel at the paper line and splitting it, leaving paper on both chuck and platter. It remained to scrape and sand off the paper. While the system worked well, drawbacks to this method involved the long glue curing time and the inability to work with green wood because the old glues did not stick to wet wood.

The same hot glues the crafters use allow us to adopt the old method easily to dry wood for platters. In this case the paper is omitted and hot glue is applied to the waste block which is quickly centered on the pencil ring on the bottom. Hot glue is very strong with the stresses of turning but has little shear strength. This means that once the top is turned and the piece sanded, a chisel can be inserted at the glue line and a quick mallet rap will separate the waste and the platter. Remaining glue is easily cleaned up and the pencil ring sanded away.

Cyanoacrylate glues, sometimes referred to as super glues after a particular brand name, allow the same procedures for green wood. Again, they have excellent strength except for shear applications and can be separated with a mallet rap. If accelerator is applied to the piece and cyanoacrylate applied to the waste the work can be immediately mounted on the lathe as can dry wood with hot glue. In both cases the waiting time is inconsequential and there is no paper to scrape away.

Sometimes the old ways are the good ways. With a little innovation they can be even better and allow even greater enjoyment in the craft of woodturning.

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