How many times do you use lathe chuck spacers? How do you keep all of the spacers in place whilst aligning the workpiece in the chuck? I had this problem recently with a small flywheel that I was holding in external jaws. I needed to space the chuck away from the plain of the jaws so that I could machine the corner, the flywheel was only 9mm thick.
The solution was to use Mini-Hold, a wax designed for holding miniature parts. Typically used in the dolls house world. Wax doesn’t really do any damage and is easily removed afterwards. However, it does have a thickness. The next image shows the remains of the wax on the chuck.
These blobs look like they have a real thickness to them, that would appear to introduce a new problem. However, I found a solution. If you place a small amount of wax on the spacers, rub them together and then pull apart, you are left with a surface smear of wax. This is still enough to hold the spacers vertically on a metal surface. Also, I tried measuring the thickness of the wax by putting the spacers together and couldn’t. That was with a manual micrometer. I’m sure someone out there will challenge me on this.
I think this is quite a neat way of holding Lathe Chuck Spacers in place.
I think you would probably get a similar effect with a blob of grease? Either way, fantastic idea. I never have enough hands when trying to mount fiddly items in the chuck.