Part II of our Nut Extraction Tutorial!

Jen is removing the wedge plunger nut. A total of 6 screws must be removed before pulling out the wedge plunger nut that contains the blank draw nut.

• Remove 6 screws surrounding the wedge plunger nut.
• Pull out the wedge plunger nut that contains the adapter nut.
• Push the adapter nut out of the center of the wedge plunger nut.

Take caution with the nut extraction — there is a ball socket and spring that may pop out at you. This below to the side flange of the adapter nut.

Enjoy the video!

Zen Jen on the warehouse floor demonstrating how to extract a draw nut adapter from a power chuck, also known as:

• draw nut
• adapter nut
• lock nut
• [fill in the blank]

The first step in the process is removing the adapter plate off the back of the chuck.

We hope you enjoy our very FIRST demo video.

Chief Chucker Annie is narrating and hopes that all our readers understand the work flow to remove adapter plates off the back of a chuck.

Please see the next post for the 2nd step in “draw nut extraction”, which includes removing the wedge plunger nut and draw nut.

Ever wonder how to remove a draw nut from a power chuck?

Inspiration for today’s blog post comes from a customer in Colombia who needed assistance removing the adapter nut.

Jen and I responded with a photo tutorial on removing a draw nut, using a smaller Strong N204 4”-diameter power chuck for reference.

Turn the power chuck body upside-down so that it’s sitting on its soft top jaws.

Step 1:

Remove adapter plate using 6 Allen wrenches from the mounting hardware packet.

Step 2:

Remove wedge plunger nut using 6 Allen wrenches.

Step 3:

Pull out wedge plunger nut along with adapter nut. Push off and remove.

All AutoStrong power chucks come standard with blank draw nut. This means the “adapter nut” is blank/solid, and needs to be threaded to fit the machine’s draw bar.

Most customers/machinists are able to thread their adapter nuts themselves. For our customers’ convenience, we stock a range of standard threaded draw nuts. 

Here’s to hoping our tutorial helped out our Colombian client! 

Cheers :),

Annie — Chief Chucker

Adopting a small family business means adopting certain traditions.

Traditions I uphold from Hank’s tenure:

• typewriter & facscimile machine: I feel like a dinosaur typing away on my electric typewriter, but I love the fact that it’s a lost art. I never charge friends for using my fax machine, but usually it’s just entertaining seeing what police reports get lost on their way to the Oakland PD.
• loyalty to our oldest customers: Most of our customers’ names and phone numbers are engrained in my memory. I know who is related to whom, and whose hobbies (catfishin’) that cause people to leave the office early on Friday afternoons.
• annual vacation time: Growing up with an emerging chuck warehouse in our garage, I remembered watching my dad sell chucks and conduct business from his home office. He was always busy and gabbing away with his clients friends on the phone about machines. I was busy enough being a student and teenager, so our paths rarely crossed. The only time we shared together was our annual family vacation, during school winter breaks between Christmas and the New Year.

This Christmas season, I took off for New York City. My redeye flight was painful landing at 5:10am, but I hustled on the LIRR and Subway in record time to Manhattan. I love sunrise in Central Park on the Upper West Side.

Having only visited Manhattan and Brooklyn, I was pleased as punch to spend New Year’s in Astoria. Here is Hell Gate Bridge as seen from Astoria Park. This was my first time exploring Queens, and I had a wonderful tour guide and new friend showing me around.

Hope everyone enjoyed their holiday and New Years’ celebrations! Happy New Year, and here’s to an amazing 2012 ahead!!

— Chief Chucker, Annie

Back in 2008, I went full-time at Best Chuck and experienced one of the absolute worst recessions in history. Our phone almost stopped ringing, customers would call simply to chat and send test faxes around the country, to see if our fax machines had died…those were tough times. Needless to say, I had a lot of free time and hand-wrote 35 greeting cards to our “best” customers for the holidays.

In 2009, I mailed out 51 holiday cards. Still reeling from the recession, I put my heart into those cards and decorated them to the gills. Our Santa Fe Springs office was covered in snowflake confetti and glitter glue for weeks.

In 2010, I was curled into a ball of exhaustion after our big move up north to Oakland.

Today, Jen and I sent 125 holiday cards with goodie bags out to our BEST customers. I am so grateful to my ever-evolving Chuck Team and family, for being incredibly supportive and encouraging through the good times and bad. Thank you to EVERYONE who has been in my warehouse, fed me, saran-wrapped my draw nuts for me, moved crates, counted inventory, etc…you are all amazing and unique snowflakes!

Done, done, and done. I am so proud of my two warehouse worker bees, Russ and Daniel, for hustling through the Gigantic Pancake Pile. In less than 2 days time, they tore apart the MESS that I decimated pancake-diving for a 20” adapter plate, and turned it into a happy pallet of adapter plates.

These adapter plates arrived from the factory in “boxes” cobbled together by smaller pieces of cardboard. They were labeled in mystical scribbles and writings that resembled both Chinese and English.

I had to mic and identify each plate as it emerged from its shady box. Russ and Daniel hustled and worked together to inspect each adapter for damages, then regreased, wrapped, and labeled the plates.

This pallet will live happily ever after under the pallet rack until it is needed again. The end!

This adorably melancholy dinosaur magically appeared on our shop window sometime this summer. I love how cheerful it is and how its green spots complement our Best Chuck/AutoStrong colors.

We are changing up the storefront display, keeping it fresh as always! I will unveil our brand new window display next week after we are done tweaking it. And yes, the dinosaur stays.

Between juggling 3 employees and my own workload, I like to play with steel.

This week’s goal is to reorganize the pallet rack under my office loft, and that includes a pallet full of GIGANTIC pancakes. In “machinist-speak”, those are adapter plates that mount power chucks to machines.

Why pancakes? I started calling “adapter plates” pancakes after all my temp workers, friends, and family started calling them “pancakes”. Out of all our stock, adapters are the flattest-looking item. Cylindrical.

I had to go pancake-diving to find the correct 20” diameter adapter plate for a customer’s order. It’s been awhile since we’ve sold an adapter plate of this size, and it was an adventure hustling through a stack of steel looking for the correct model. The pile is decimated, and patiently awaiting to be relabeled and reshelved. Thank jumping jellyfish I now have employees to clean up after me!

Everyone loves a good yarn (my favorite is Louisa Harding’s wool and alpaca yarn in Thistle) so here’s a tale about last week’s delivery of our ocean freight shipment.

Not only did our 2 pallets of 56 crates arrive unannounced and unscheduled, we had two shady truck drivers that did not appear to know what they were doing.

I don’t care what planet you’re from — unloading pallets off a lift gate like this is WHOLLY dangerous and life-threatening. There was a second when the lift-gate dropped…and my heart dropped as well, as my mind squirreled *$%@^#~+) “THAT IS 4,000 lbs of PRECIOUS STEEL!!! MY PRECIOUS!!!

Plain and simple…it took 2 hours for these 2 geniuses to unload our freight. It also took my grey dolly, my red hydraulic dolly, myself and 5 friends to PUSH the pallets from the front to the back of the truck.

Remind me why I pay exorbitant freight fees, when my friends and I are the ones doing the pushing and sweating, and trying not to get hit by falling steel.

End rant! I am off for a massage as soon as my last biggie, a Strong SC-16 16” 3-jaw manual scroll chuck ships to Canada.

Forking 1,800 lbs of steel is a wonderful way to return to the office/warehouse after a fantastic weekend. I volunteered at the info booth at the 4th Annual SF Bicycle Expo, hosted by our awesome neighbors rideSFO.

Thank GOODNESS I had both Jen and Russ in-warehouse to help get this gargantuan monster out the door. We had to do a pallet swap and some ingenious wrapping to stabilize the load.

That there beauty is a Strong V240 40” 3-jaw closed center power chuck with a custom draw bar strapped and wrapped to the top of the crate. Our crazy customer almost WILL-CALLed this package all the way from Southern California. I even considered opening on the weekend to help them pick up the freight. After days of back and forth, the smart decision was finally made to ship this via LTL freight.

Other than that, not much else is going on in Chuckland, Oakland. Playing with the sealer, sealing up wedge plunger nuts, and moving onto customizing baggies of T-nuts!