Midland Tool Manufacturing Company have been bringing innovative design to Soft Jaws over the last fourteen years.

They make all the conventional Soft Jaws on the market for both Manual and Power Chucks - including special scroll jaws to fit obsolete chucks where customers usually find them impossible to locate and end up throwing the chuck away.

They then put their minds to solving their customers most usual work holding problems - increasing the wraparound holding surface, pointing the jaws for small diameter work and eliminating the downtime involved in changing the jaws for each job.

They came up with the brilliant idea of using an hexagonal shaped jaw instead of the usual rectangle and designed it in such a way that each hexagon can be rotated six times without taking the base jaw out of the chuck.

They also make Soft Jaws to fit Power Chucks out of hexagonal shaped steel which have the jaw detail on the base. These locate directly onto the chuck as a conventional serrated jaw does but, being hexagonal, are already pointed and give total wraparound for over half of the chuck surface. The alternative 'diamond' jaws are about three times the price and are often so heavy that there is substantial loss of grip due to centrifugal forces.

Midland Tool have established their reputation for quality and service over the years and now supply some of the biggest names in the UK chuck market such as Pratt International, Tos and Myford. They also supply hundreds of small as well as prestige customers direct.

One soft jaw user is Indianapolis 500 racing car manufacturers, Penske Cars. Their Production Manager, Colin Hearn explained, "We originally evaluated the hexagonal soft jaws around eighteen months ago during the manufacture of our 1988 entry for the Indianapolis 500. Over ninety per cent of our cars are designed and manufactured within our Poole factory, using high tensile steels and carbon composite fibres which require machining to extremely close tolerances. Virtually all the major components such as wishbones, push rods, axles and running gear are manufactured as 'one offs'. These hexagonal jaws allow six different working surfaces with greater wraparound for our precision milling and turning. Because of the improved machining accuracy with using these jaws, our material wastage costs have been greatly reduced. Downtime for changing jaws has virtually been eliminated. The costs of fitting new jaws for every component has been minimised through the additional working surfaces, which has led to substantial savings on our production costs".