Within Wood Turning, it's important to hold the wood I'm turning securely to the lathe. There are various ways to do this, and the way depends on what is being turned and who is doing it - a production turner (someone who might turn many of the same item in one day) might work very differently to someone who just turns a few pieces a week.
I'm not a production turner (my health conditions don't allow that), but some of the methods commonly used don't suit me - for example some might use a "Screw Chuck" where a coarse screw thread is screwed in to a pre-drilled hole in the wood, and mounted on a chuck. Muscular issues with my hands/wrists prevent me from using this method.
What I prefer are "Glue Chucks" - I glue the wood I'm working on to a spare piece of wood, which in turn has a tenon turned, which is held by jaws on my chucks. I usually glue a sacrificial piece of in-between, so I can fully access the wood I'm working on.
Using this method, I can turn an accurately sized tenon on the glue chuck that is the full depth to suit the chuck - this provides the most secure way of attaching to the chuck - my pieces rarely move in the chuck when being turned even without tail stock support.
This also suits the shapes I turn on my lathe - for my bowls I turn the sides and inside when glued to the same glue chuck - this speeds up my processes - I don't turn it around on the lathe. I then part the base off the glue chuck, then either sand the base, or mount in soft jaws to finish the base.
Often turners might turn the outside of a bowl, create a tenon, and turn the bowl around to do the inside - but to my mind, you can rarely create such a deep tenon as I have on my glue chucks (with my Axminster jaws, my tenon can be 15mm deep).
It doesn't take me long to glue the wood to the glue chuck - but if was doing many items a day, it wouldn't be practical. However, due to my health conditions I turn small quantities of items - so the glue chuck method is ideal for me.
For glue, if the temperature is above 10 deg, I use Titebond - even with bigger bowls I've never had the glue bond break - yet anyway. Under 10 deg, Titebond isn't recommended apparently, so I use a Gorilla glue that requires water to activate it - bit more time consuming, but it works just as well, so far - even when gluing end grain to side grain.
Some of my wood starts off as a tree, which I've usually halved or quarter to dry it - so it's quite an odd shape. This isn't suitable to mount on a glue chuck to start with - I need a good flat surface to glue on to. In those cases, I might use a 4 prong centre to create flatter faces on the wood - or a face plate screwed on. But once that is done, typically I'll then glue to a glue chuck.
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