Thread: Vicmarc quick release handles - customising

Thought a few photos of my recent adventure in using and customising the Vicmarc quick release handles would be in order and possibly helpful to others so that they can learn from my mistakes

Firstly why am I even looking at quick release handles as opposed to turning individual handles

• Bowl gouges are a pain to sharpen with the handle on due to the total length clashing with my girth
• In my previous home I could put my lathe near a wall and had a rack with all my tools and could easily pick and choose. Moved to a new house so needed a different solution that took less space - have made myself a carousel (pvc tubes on a lazy susan) and hence the tall tools not ideal and wider diameters of individual tool handles take more space.
• I got a gift certificate and bought myself a Vicmarc quick release handle to check out

Most of my work is smaller scale so i have smaller bowl gouges and hollowing tools - hence till now I had been playing with a ER collet chuck as my quick release system
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But the ER chucks for bigger diameters get quite bulky and still a pain to unscrew and change collets which led me down the path of thinking about adding adapters to all my tools so that they were a single diameter on the handle end.

(as an aside - I also had a close look at the Jimmy Clewes quick release handles and was really keen but between the exchange rate and shipping cost using my gift certificate to investigate the vicmarc option was preferred. Though if money not as tight I would prefer the Jimmy Clewes adapters as I like wooden handles)

Enter the Vicmarc handle with its ¾" bore. Firstly I tried making adapters out of wood - didn't work satisfactorily - not only were the tolerances required greater than expected but the wood also compressed in the collet over time.
Plan B - since I don't have a metal lathe (yet) I went and bought a length of ¾" aluminium bar and this worked perfectly in the Vicmarc quick release. Cut some pieces and put in my pen drilling jaws to drill out et voila! works a dream - note you do need to make sure you chamfer the ends and don't create nicks with the jaws, masking tape works well.

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Since it is a single diameter and doesn't have a wider top edge to stop it slipping straight down the handle I came up with two alternatives

• Put a dimple/ridge in using a cold chisel/punch - per top adapter
• Or, my preferred, peen over/mushroom the edge - tolerances on handle are so good it needs very little to stop it slipping all the way through

Next problem: I can get the long and medium handles from Vicmarc with the ¾" bore but nothing shorter for my spindle tool handles - Vicmarc also no longer makes the handles without the PVC - so some customising is in order.
Purchased another handle and got one in the older brown/bronze pvc handle (yay!) as opposed to the newer blue handles. These handles are put together slightly differently even though the main components are similar.

Will discuss the brown one first:
You will see on one the flats there is dowel pin - this goes through the pvc and the aluminium tube into the main adapter body to keep the threads "locked"
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So knocked the dowel pin all the way through - with some difficulty unscrewed the adapter (let's be honest I was trying to twist the pvc off the aluminium tube and discovered the adapter was threaded) - and then had to lever the adapter out of the PVC - those ridges make it near impossible to "slip" the pvc off the adapter and tube.

Now for the blue handled one:
No dowel pin in sight - couldn't feel anything through the pvc - so one of these handles was going to get butchered to create a shorter spindle tool handle and the blue one just volunteered.
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You can see the ridges are moulded into the pvc as well hence why I couldn't slide the pvc off the handle even with some heat.
For the blue handle - the aluminium tube/handle is secured to the adapter with thread and .... thread locker ... you can see from the image below that I also learnt this the hard way. At first I thought it was an interference fit with loctite but it is threaded.
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So if I had to do again I don't know how I would avoid having to cut the pvc off. Undoing the adapter would definitely require heat to break the loctite's grip.

Also figured out the hard way how the blue stopper in the handle works ... use an allen key to loosen and move up and down to control depth for lead shot etc.
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So this is what I have ended up with
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Today's job will be to make a shorter handle out of elm for the "freed" adapter. For the brown pvc handle I didn't replace the dowel pin - rather just put some super glue between the pvc and aluminium tube/handle - this is necessary else the pvc just spins when you try to undo the quick release (by now you should know how I know this ). I much prefer the look/finish/feel of the brown pvc - the blue pvc is a bit tackier and loves dust more so it might eventually be replaced as well. I was thinking of a staved wood construction for the handle (over the aluminium tube) but I have enough length in the adapter that I will just make a sold wood handle.
Also the thread on the adapter end of the tube is identical to the butt end thread.

Only other thing left for me to figure out is how to use the ¾" bar for rectangular tools e.g. scrapers - will probably go with a round hole that will accept the tool and then fill it out with wooden dowel and epoxy i.e. sandwich the rectangular tool between segments of a circle to make the whole assemble round.

And just in case you weren't sure how the quick release worked: the rotating part of the handle has a bore that is slightly not aligned to the main body of the adapter and hence when you twist the handle it goes from being perfectly aligned to not and "jams" the tool.

Any questions - just shout.
cheers
Robin

P.S. If I knew the above and was starting from scratch I would contact Vicmarc to see if the adapters could be bought on their own. They have been incredibly helpful to me in the past.