Washer trick fixed my part seating issue in 2 days flat

I run a little 2-axis lathe out of my garage in Cleveland, and for like 6 months every other part would come out with a tiny wobble on the flange (not enough to scrap, but enough to bug me). I tried adjusting the chuck pressure, swapping jaws, even cleaning the spindle taper on Thursday night. Then my buddy Dave, who runs a big shop downtown, stopped by and said "your part's seating on the chamfer, not the face." He handed me a pack of 0.005" shim washers from his truck, told me to put one under the jaw bolt on each side. I did that Friday morning, and the difference in runout went from 0.003" down to 0.0005" on every single part since. Has anyone else used the washer trick for weird seating issues, or is this just a hack that only works on older machines like mine?

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1 Comment

thea2461mo ago

Hang on, that shim is just masking the real problem, you're basically telling the machine to lie to you and sooner or later that chamfer wear or jaw deflection is gonna catch up and bite you harder than the original wobble ever did. And honestly, 0.003" runout on a garage lathe is already pretty dang good, chasing that last half a thou with washers feels like polishing a turd.