WoodCraft Cole Jaws

This is one in a series of posts about some of my past projects.

Those who have the wood river chuck and buy the cole jaws for it will probably be very interested in this one.


The standoffs that come with the cole jaws are more like hard plastic than they are rubber. If you don't tighten the chuck enough, the bowl will spin easily and the black plastic they used for the nubs creates a nice black streak around the outer rim of the bowl. By the time you tighten the chuck enough for it to hold the bowl, you'll create a divot where each pin is around the edge of your bowl. IMO, they dropped the ball on this part; I have no idea what they were thinking, but highly doubt that whoever designed them knows anything about turning.

The solution is to buy a Nova cole jaw kit, priced at $11, along with your cole jaws. (I got my cole jaws for christmas and went back to woodcraft with a crushed edge bowl; after kicking ideas around, the guy sold me the nova kit at a discount in the hope it'd work. They were very helpful and had some good ideas.) On the way home, stop at the hardware store and get 8 lock washers of the size that the brass screws will just barely not fit through. (Sorry - didn't note the size and it's not on the receipt; they were a nickel each at ACE.) Take all of it home and using a pair of channel-lock pliers to hold the washer and a screwdriver inserted through it, twist the lock washer so it's basically flat. Put one on each brass screw and thread it into the grey rubber nubs, then put these on your cole jaws. You'll now be able to tighten your jaws around the edge of your bowl quite well and not damage your piece.



Explanation: The rubber nubs in the Nova kit are MUCH softer than the hard black plastic nubs that come with the wood river cole jaws and so can be tightened without damaging your work. The nubs that come with the wood river cole jaws have the black plastic molded right over the screws, so you have to use the nova screws. The only problem with this is that they're slightly long for the wood river jaws - if you put them in your cole jaws, the chuck will work very stiffly, if at all. This is because the back end of the screw is pressed against the face of the chuck behind the jaws and scratching the hell out of it. To get around this, you need some sort of washer, but regular washers don't have a chance of fitting down inside the gray nubs. I could use a regular washer between the nub and the face of the cole jaw, but then the edge of my bowls could slip underneath and be off-center, plus I'd have to keep track of the washers when changing the position of the nubs. By getting the small lock washers and deforming them to be flat, you open them up just enough for the screw to fit through and the OD is still just barely small enough to fit in the recesses in top of the grey nubs. This effectively makes the screws tighten the nubs against the face of the jaws and not protrude through the back into the chuck face. Additionally, the screws fit tight enough in the grey nubs that I needed to use a screwdriver to get them in; the grey nub, screw, and lock washer are effectively a single piece so I don't have to worry about them coming apart when moving the nubs to turn the bottom of different sized bowls.