Cheap Chinese 3jaw chuck.

Hello all, bought a 4 inch self centreing Chinese 3jaw chuck (£43) off ebay, made a backplate and fitted it to a spin indexer. Chucked a piece of 3/4 inch ground bar and checked the runnout - 1 1/2 thousands of an inch !!!!.

Not bad at all. Incredible value.

As an aside, my friend asked me some time ago if I could repair a bottom guide runner of a VW Transporter sliding door , VW price about £110 . Got one off ebay , Chinese of course , for £8.90. Beautifully made too. Delivery included. Bloody hell !!.

I also bought a cheap Chinese chuck (San Ou) via eBay, £108 for an 8" 4-jaw self-centring, delivered from within the UK within 3 working days by courier. I had to source an L0 fitting (£50 eBay) and make an interstitial plate and I did take a great deal of time and trouble over the fitting together of the three items but when I checked the chuck on the lathe with a 1" ground test bar I found the run-out to be less than 0.001" near the chuck jaws and less than 1.5 thou. 12 inches out. Everything about the chuck smacks of quality materials and manufacturing.

Personally, I just don't get all the Sino-phobic nonsense you sometimes read in this forum, there have been good and bad products of varying quality from all manufacturing nations, not least the UK in years gone by. Everything is made to hit a particular price point in the market and the Chinese certainly seem to hit the target with ever increasing value and quality.

Well done. All I will add is that maybe you were lucky, run-out at one particular point of closure may not be representative and that is not the only measure of quality to consider.

And with the greatest respect, may be we were not just 'lucky' and the cheap Chinese chuck really is a good quality product. But if anyone is sceptical about these Chinese products, and they are fortunate enough to have the spare funds to invest in a so-called 'quality' British product such as the Pratt-Burnerd at about ten times the price, then that is their prerogative, although I have been informed even some 600-Group products now originate in Asia, maybe even their chucks for all I know.

For the purposes of amateur use in a back-shed workshop, my guess is that there wouldn't be anything much to choose between the two products except the price. If I recall correctly, about forty years ago now when Polish and Czech products were first beginning to enter the British market, there were reviews of the chucks in the model engineering press. The conclusion at that time was that the Polish chuck was superior and you would hardly want to own a Czech product. Well despite the review, I bought a Czech 4-jaw self-centring chuck for the Myford at an exhibition for no other reason than it was about twenty quid cheaper than the Polish version and looked exactly the same. I can tell you that in all those forty years it has hardly left the lathe and is as good as the day I bought it. Now I understand, Czech products are regarded as being some of the best in the world, so maybe one day all the prejudice against Chinese products, which I think is more founded in xenophobia and rather than established fact, will disappear too. (BTW, I do understand the political implications of China's manufacturing prowess, but that debate is not for this forum).

Chris,...Wether or not you were 'lucky' depends entirely on how you define 'luck'......

It seems to be mostly forgotten or ignored that the 'Chinese rubbish' is being sold by UK middlemen, importers and others who have greatly enjoyed a wonderful bonanza buying Chinese for the very lowest price that they can get, and thus, have plenty of rubbish to entice UK buyers with.... China only sells rubbish to people who order it from them.

....but that bonanza is almost over now that China has Europe where it wants it......

It comes as a repeated shock to Europeans that the Chinese are a deeply pragmatic and energetic people backed by a 4000 year history and civilaisation who can make whatever they want to at whatever level of complexity and quality......but the bill is coming soon for us, I fear.

For considerably less than the cost of a set of jaws for my Pratt-Burnerd 160mm three jaw I bought an Indian made "Zither" chuck. Runs very true at all openings and good value only let down by a less than smooth scroll operation.

I bought one of those 'Polish' chucks (read Bison) back then, Rotagrip sold them for £30 so your £10 Czech chuck (and probably a TOS) was a bargain

I also bought around the same time a trolley jack from Halfords that was so badly machined the cylinder pivot point came out the side of the lug, guess where that came from.

Edited By Dave Halford on 15/07/2021 09:43:51

Yes, it was a TOS, I can't recall that it was as cheap as you suggest but certainly a real bargain that has served its purpose well. I understand that this Czech machine tool manufacturer has since become one of the most respected in the world since the collapse of the USSR as the West became better acquainted with the capabilities of the former Russian republics and certainly since the Czech Republic and Poland became members of the EU.

Chinese quality can range from utter rubbish to world class quality, with a huge range between. This gives scope for the Chinese knockers to feel smug and also for people to be very satisfied with what they get from China.

I strongly suspect that the western importers have a great deal to do with the perceived quality of Chinese goods on sale in the UK.

Andrew.