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Trivia Question #129 Who invented the "VC"?

T

Tony Latham

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I just cranked out an 8" natural edged elm bowl... start to finish and it sure was easy to finish the bottom with my trusty vacuum chuck setup.... got me wondering...

Who was the first woodturner to use vacuum pressure on a lathe????

Maybe it's a no-brainer but who ever it was had a different (and bigger) chunk of gray matter than I have...

TL😀
 
I'll be interested in knowing that also. I know vacuum presses were used for many years in the flat wood industry so it doesn't surprise me that someone would have a pump laying around and having tried all sorts of ways to reverse turn a bowl simply grabbed the pump and hooked it up.
They had also been used as chucks for routing which is how I started using vacuum.
 
Tony Latham said:
I just cranked out an 8" natural edged elm bowl... start to finish and it sure was easy to finish the bottom with my trusty vacuum chuck setup.... got me wondering...

Who was the first woodturner to use vacuum pressure on a lathe????

Maybe it's a no-brainer but who ever it was had a different (and bigger) chunk of gray matter than I have...

TL😀
Click to expand...

Good question John. I bet Wally knows.
 
If you absolutely, positively, must know all about them, search the US Patent Office database. ["vacuum chuck"] in all fields just got 4,254 hits from about 1976 onward. The earliest, #3930684, cites a reference to #2293553, by Magnusson, in August 1942.

Restriction to woodturning would probably be later. Correct: #5445052 is earlier of two hits, by John Nichols of Oregon, August 1995; but cites #904679 by Bruton, November 1908, which probably isn't vacuum.

And I'm not Wally.😀
 
VC Chuck Inventor

Below is a link to a USPTO website with a 1994 patent specifically calling out a chuck design for woodturning as we know them today. It makes for interesting reading and gives a good example of the degree of detail necessary to patent one's "great ideas".

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=%22lathe+vacuum+chuck%22&OS="lathe+vacuum+chuck"&RS="lathe+vacuum+chuck"

Jerry Wright
 
This just relates to the question.I remenber about 15 to 16 years ago that the first time I was exposed to it was at the Texas Turn Or Two. Can not rember their names but two men from the Midland Tx area I think did a demo on vacuum chucking, with shop made equipment. worked great then and now.
 
No offense, but you are all wrong...

...the first person to use a vacuum chuck was Og. He had just finished shaping his prehistoric bowl and was looking at the bottom when the idea struck him. He made his wife steaming mad and she let out a tirade of grunts like Og had never heard before. After about 5 minutes of this Og grabbed a animal intestine and put it over his wife's mouth and put the other side on his headstock. It is rumored that he was pulling 26 hg while his wife caught her breath and he finished the bottom of the bowl perfectly. There was good news and bad news about the bowl though. The bad news was the wife took the bowl from OG and cracked it over his head. The good news is, once he recovered OG saw that he had even thickness throughout the bowl.
 
JRutten said:
...the first person to use a vacuum chuck was Og. He had just finished shaping his prehistoric bowl and was looking at the bottom when the idea struck him. He made his wife steaming mad and she let out a tirade of grunts like Og had never heard before. After about 5 minutes of this Og grabbed a animal intestine and put it over his wife's mouth and put the other side on his headstock. It is rumored that he was pulling 26 hg while his wife caught her breath and he finished the bottom of the bowl perfectly. There was good news and bad news about the bowl though. The bad news was the wife took the bowl from OG and cracked it over his head. The good news is, once he recovered OG saw that he had even thickness throughout the bowl.
Click to expand...

This is true, I read that somewhere else on the interent.
 
VC - Role of Og

This is all true. In doing a little Wikipedia research on Og and his woodturning exploits, I ran across a reference to the advanced nature of his design skills. Contrary to many claims to the contrary, Og invented the use of computer aided design, shortly after he invented the internet. See attached documentation.

Jerry
 

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I'm glad I started this thread. I've been a card carrying AAW member now for at least a month now... But here is a thought for the AAW leadership: Figure out who is responsible and give them some kind of life-time recognition award...

Just a thought by some rookie wood chipper.😎

TL
 
Seeing that vacuum chucking is an obvious solution to a question waiting to be asked, my guess is that like many things, this idea occurred to a great number of woodturners independently.

Without a doubt, the Og story is true, but his early system had too many inherent shortcomings to gain wide acceptance in the woodturning community. Since the advent of the Internet with its great knowledge sharing capabilities, the evolution of designs began accelerating ever faster and now has reached the point where the domestic tranquility aspect of Og's design is no longer a stumbling block.
 
VC - Domestic Tranquility

While a lathe in the house certainly helps contribute to domestic tranquility, it can't do it all! Maybe that is why NASA referred to the moon landing area as Tranquility Base - it was 240000 miles from earth!!!🙂

Jerry
 
rjones said:
This just relates to the question.I remenber about 15 to 16 years ago that the first time I was exposed to it was at the Texas Turn Or Two. Can not rember their names but two men from the Midland Tx area I think did a demo on vacuum chucking, with shop made equipment. worked great then and now.
Click to expand...

Johnny and Jimmy Tolly
 
Going back to the beginnings of vacuum chucking, my 1st exposure to a vacuum chuck was in the pattern shop in 1954. It was in common use for holding large flat work, and they used a slip ring behind the faceplate because the lathe spindles were solid. Oliver made a heavy duty vacuum chuck.

It took woodturners another 50 years to discover vacuum chucking. I suspect it was some oldtime patternmaker who did it.
 
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