Chuck recycling...

I'm a habitual hoarder of things, I actually have a small three drawer unit in my shed that's full of stuff that 'might be useful in the future' so basically I keep a lot of crap stuff with potential  lying about, and needless to say I have a few old chucks that needed new purpose so I made handles for them and turned them into tool holders for turning wood.

Finished tool holders.

It's pretty simple to do really and you could easily do this without a lathe, all I've done is to turn handles for the chucks from the legs of an old stool.

Making the second one - 

Removed the bits I didn't need.

The black chuck is from a flexible drive shaft, I mainly use them for sanding pieces on the lathe, but every now and then they break and I tend to keep the chucks for things such as this.

Once I'd removed the old bearings (which I kept of course) all it needed was a handle, this was made easier because of the piece of drive shaft left on the back of the chuck, all I did was to turn a handle from an old stool leg.

I found a piece that was a nice size for my hand - 

That'll do nicely.

Handle turned roughly - 

I left the old pegs in, it adds a nice feature to the handle.

Now to fit the chuck - 

First hole drilled.

Fitting the chuck into the wood is an easy task, all I've done is to drill two holes, the first matches the smaller section of the shaft left on the chuck, the second hole matches the thicker part of the chuck.

The chuck up close - 

Note the handy hole.

I made the respective holes slightly smaller than needed and then with the lathe spinning I pushed the chuck into the wood the friction causes the inside of the holes to burn slightly and this helps to keep things nice and tight.

This chuck also had a useful hole in it, this I've used to push a split pin through so that the chuck won't spin inside the wood.

For this tool holder I used a piece of 22mm copper tube to make a ferrule for the end, to stop the wood from splitting, this was done by cutting a piece of the pipe and sliding it onto the handle.

Ferrule cut, needs tidying - 

A bit wonky, but we can clean that up on the lathe.

Ferrule fitted and tidied up - 

Looks much better.

And that is about it really, I used some two part epoxy glue to hold the chuck and the ferrule in place, although I've kept things quite tight so I could have not used the glue but I figured it wouldn't hurt.

I drilled through the ferrule on both tools holders so that I can use a split pin to stop any twisting as these make handy screw driver bit holders as well as turning tool holders.

Here's one and some of the adapted Allen key turning tools - 

Useful.

I've found these little tool holders to be quite versatile, handy as a screw driver as well as a turning bit holder and all from stuff I had lying bout, I have used this tool recently to turn some captive rings which you can read about here - captive ring tool (opens in new window) the plan now is to make a few more bits for turning, small scrapers and such like.

These could easily be made without a lathe and if you're like me you're bound to have enough bits lying about to make something similar, so why not give and old chuck a new lease on life?

Thanks for reading.