Shopsmith Forums

Tecknatool has a direct help telephone line or you can e-mail them. See their website. I think they're in Florida. I'd talk with them and perhaps they can guide you through the issue. Let us know how that conversation goes.

I just got off the phone with Bob at Teknatool in Florida. He listened to my description of the problem, asked a few questions, and gave me a return authorization number for a warranty exchange. He is also going to check out my chuck and jaws when he receives it to see where the problem is.

I'll stop by the post office tomorrow on my way home from work.

This past Sat I got my Nova live center system that was ordered on March 2 of this year. Nova/Teknatool has production facilities in China (anyone surprised) and the entire production of the lathe centers to fulfill those orders were all defective and had to be remanufactured. They may be having more problems that they haven't recognized yet.
Bill V

wa2crk wrote:This past Sat I got my Nova live center system that was ordered on March 2 of this year. Nova/Teknatool has production facilities in China (anyone surprised) and the entire production of the lathe centers to fulfill those orders were all defective and had to be remanufactured. They may be having more problems that they haven't recognized yet.
Bill V

Let us not bash Teknatool/Nova for delaying shipment on a production run that they found to be defective. I worked in manufacturing and based on that experience I know first hand that occasionally sh** happens. Furthermore, when it does happen, management must be convinced that it did and that there is nothing to be done but delay shipment. Many times management wins and it gets shipped anyhow.

Bravo Nova. You could have shipped it but you did not.

Dusty
That was my point. Stuff does happen at least Nova found it and made the corrections. Perhaps they missed some of the chucks. Not blaming Nova, they did the right thing. My comment was intended to be an observation not a condemnation.
Bill V

Another observations is that the consumer becomes the company's quality control and that means you buy the product, pay to have it shipped to you, and then have the extra cost of shipping it back to the company so that you can start the process again. If the company pays for that return shipping, that's fine. But if they don't, I wouldn't be too happy.

dusty wrote:Let us not bash Teknatool/Nova for delaying shipment on a production run that they found to be defective. I worked in manufacturing and based on that experience I know first hand that occasionally sh** happens. Furthermore, when it does happen, management must be convinced that it did and that there is nothing to be done but delay shipment. Many times management wins and it gets shipped anyhow.

Bravo Nova. You could have shipped it but you did not.

For the record, they did not catch all of the defective live center systems. I just sent a defective one I received back for replacement.

I called Teknatool on Friday, 20 July. They had received my chuck, and said a new one would be in the mail to me today. Hopefully I will have it tomorrow or Wednesday!

The guy on the phone agreed that 0.016" was pretty far out.

Teknatool managed to get the chuck in the mail to me on Friday - they didn't think they could - so it showed up yesterday (Monday).

The problem is that this chuck is worse than the first. The first chuck had 0.005" runout on a steel rod chucked in the internal jaws - which is ok, but the problem was the 0.016" runout on a steel rod chucked in the spigot/pin jaws.

The replacement chuck I received yesterday has between 0.013 and 0.018" runout on a steel rod chucked in the internal jaws.

The good news is that there is no appreciable difference in runout of the spigot/pin jaws.

It appears that I got a good set of pin jaws this time, so I'll call Teknatool back today and ask to just send the G3 chuck body back in this time.

Also, the replacement Shopsmith adapter is better than the first one. The first one was too tight and wouldn't seat on the quill fully. It's runout was 0.0015" and the runout of the replacement is less than 0.0005" It's basically dead on.

I spoke with Teknatool on the phone this morning. They said that 0.005" is the speced tolerance for the G3 chuck - which is exactly what I measured on the first one (it was the pin jaws that were bad).

He said he wanted to talk to one of the other guys in the shop before giving me a return authorization number to see what the best course of action would be.

One other observation about this second G3 - the one measuring 0.015" on a rod chucked in the internal jaws: the stamp on the jaw body that says Teknatool Nova made in PRC has a double strike. Maybe the chuck body wasn't seated properly in the manufacturing jig.

We'll see what they say.