Balancing act from Northfield Precision Instrument Corp.

Island Park, New York – Northfield Precision Instrument Corp. engineers have designed a special gimbaling collet chuck. This chuck uses a special precision collet to grip the pitch diameter of a splined drive shaft for balancing. The collet taper is ground inside a sphere, which is then installed to the mating sphere, allowing the collet to gimbal. When a drive shaft is placed in a balance machine, it whips due to the unbalance. If the chuck holds the shaft rigid (not allowing whip), the shaft is falsely balanced with poor results. This gimbal chuck cuts the balance cycle in half with superior accuracy.

Northfield Precision Instrument designs and manufactures accurate air chucks for any lathe, boring machine, grinder, or VMC. Models include through-hole, high-speed and quick-change. Chucks are available in SAE or metric, in sizes from 3” (76mm) to 18” (457mm).

Accuracies of 0.001” to 0.00001” (0.254m) are guaranteed. 

Source: Northfield Precision Instrument Corp.