Longworth Chuck

Hello,

This is my first Instructable. I saw one of these chucks for a wood lathe and decided that it would be a good idea to try to make one. Basically, the premise is that centrifugal force holds the work in place. There was some traditional instructions and better description of what they are used for here . The guy is a very skilled craftsman, and his instructions made sense. I wanted to cut one on our laser cutter for our workshop at the school and also so I could flip plaster work in my ceramics studio without grabbing it too much. The whole disk is 250mm and will hold up to 200mm.

Step 1: CAD Files

Here are all the CAD files.

I drew the chuck with Adobe Illustrator, and imported it into our laser cutting software (lasercut 5.3). It created a bunch of config files and proprietary *.ecp files. If you can use them directly great, if not ignore and use the Illustrator (*.ai) files.

There is quite a bit of scope for tweaking and I have only really worked on this for a day so, 'It works' but please change and scale to your needs.

Please get in touch if you have any questions, and please look at the external link at the Intro from which I got the idea.