I have access to a lathe in a machine shop. I want to turn my corg rings which are glued to the blank-old school method. Blank is graphite. Lathe has 3 jaw chuck. Anyone out there have experience doing this? Question is....what is method to secure the blank in chuck? It's a fly rod, area to put in chuck is where I will mount the reel seat. Certainly don't want to crush the blank. Thanks for any feedback.
Mike

Mike,
I have turned many many full length rods when turning cork grips.

The process is very simple.

With no butt cap on the blank - take a piece of solid graphite or fiberglass about 6 -8 inches long insert it into the lathe chuck and and bring it up to speed. Since the material is solid, there will be no crushing.

Then, use various grades of sand paper to taper down the size of the solid material so that it will be nice slip fit on the inside of the blank that you are wanting to turn. The idea is to have a uniform taper that matches the slight taper of the typical rod blank butt section.

Then, you want to be able to slip the solid stock up into the rod blank butt section about 4 inches, and then have the taper uniformly grab the interior of the rod blank so that the gripping of the turning stock is equally gripping about the last 4 inches of the butt section.

Then, if this is a multi piece fly rod, you want one steady rest about one inch in front of the grip, and another steady rest 2 feet in front of that. Then is you have a multi piece fly rod, the rest of the blank should be stiff enough to avoid any whipping.

I use a 3 ball bearing steady rest that I can lock down solidly around the rod blank In each area where I will be using the steady rest, I put 2-3 wraps of masking tape around the blank to prevent any blank marking from the ball bearings.

If you can lock down both sides of the steady rest, you can use the typical steady rest used on rod wrappers. But you want the steady rest to be rock solid reliable since you do not want the blank to go flying out of the rest when turning at speed.

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The following is a picture of the steady rests that I made some years ago - to support the rod blanks when doing full length turning of rod grips on the blank:

[www.rodbuilding.org]

These rests are made using bar stock aluminum, non threaded rod, that I put threads on to screw into the base, and inexpensive skate board high quality ball bearings. When, I would turn 7 foot single piece light action rods I would typically use 5 of these rod rests to avoid any blank whipping. When I turned I used a single speed 3600 rpm motor, so I had to have the spacing of the steady rests correct to avoid harmonic vibration and blank destruction.

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The following is a picture of the lathe that I currently use to turn grips:

[www.rodbuilding.org]

Notice the steady rest that I use to support the end of the grip while center drilling the solid wood handle.

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If the machine shop lathe also has a headstock and use of a Jacobs chuck - so much the better. The jacobs chuck does a very nice job to grip the solid stock that you will be using to hold the rod blank.

But, if the 3 jaw chuck is appropriate, it will also do an excellent job of holding the solid stock. The only concern that one might have is that some of the 3 jaw chucks have a set of fairly pointed jaws that may want to really dig into the solid stock that you use to hold the rod blank.

Good luck on your turning.

Roger thanks for taking it out I made a mistake on posting it to this TOPIC I assume you did it Bill

William Sidney
AK