Yesterday I received a new H6267 4 jaw chuck from Griz. I had been using a T10811 4 jaw kit and liked it, but grew tired of going through the process of removing and reinstalling eight screws in order to change the jaws. So I thought that I would buy another chuck so one would generally be set with a small set of jaws and one large. I would still have to swap out jaws when I switched over to the cole jaws, but that isn't an every other day sort of thing.
I mounted the new chuck and noticed that I have about 0.015" lateral runout. Hmmm...
I removed the jaws to make sure that there wasn't any debris under them, re-cleaned my spindle, re-cleaned the chuck, etc. Although I found a chunk of metal under one jaw, the runout is still on the order of 0.014". hmmm.
I checked the thickness of each jaw and they are close to equal (as they should be).
I used a caliper to measure the inside of the jaws and the outside of the jaws looking at set 1-3 and comparing it to set 2-4. The jaws do not define a circle but define a slight oval that is roughly 0.013-0.015 out-of-round. I swapped jaws 1 and 2 and remeasured and the oval is independent of the jaws and follows the chuck. This suggests that the scroll is not quite in the center.
I put in the 4 inch set of jaws and the out-of-round actually seemed to get larger (around 0.018) although the runout was about the same.
I also noticed that the holes for the allen screws are not the same depth and some are drilled too shallow. Rather than firming locking into place, the friction just slowly went up as I was tightening. Some of the screws are now showing that their ends are getting deformed as I force them in.
I'm reluctant to just swap it out for the same model.
Am I being too fussy and is this the quality that I should expect from a $150 chuck with 2 sets of jaws?