19mm dowel by hand

[mrgrimsdale]

Been over there again. Well we're on the wagon tonight and there's nowt on the telly.
They are all wondering about how to make a short length of 19mm dowel.
First select a bit of straight grained scrap:



Then reduce it nearer to size with an axe. This quicker than sawing but more importantly, it means straight grain as the split will follow the grain.



Then mark the diameter at each end. Best done with something like a wad punch if you have one, as an incised mark is easier to plane down to, as it shows up when you reach it, without you having to peer at pencil marks



Jack down to join the marks, holding in a vice



put a bit of scrap in as an end stop if it gets difficult to hold:



You could do it all with a jack but might be easier if you use smaller planes for finer cuts. I really like that little red plane but I hardly get a chance to use it!



All this takes a few minutes. The photography takes longer!

Now you are close to the size, so what you do next depends on how you are going to use the dowel.
If it's to fit a hole, then jam each end in the hole and give it a twist - which will show as a shiny mark. You then carry on joining the marks at each end, with a plane, or sand paper etc, as before, until it fits.

[jfc]

I nipped over aswell and they are wondering why its 6" and 9 " for hinges on a door . When i looked no one had mentiond the fact that a doors bottom rail is larger so the mortice will be higher . In fact they where thinking it looks better rather than effecting the structure of a door

[wizer]

I know MrG doesn't agree with this. But every house I have owned and lots that I have visited, have three hinges, evenly spaced. All modern builds, admittedly.

[mrgrimsdale]

Oct 20, 2008 7:19:39 GMT wizer said:

I know MrG doesn't agree with this. But every house I have owned and lots that I have visited, have three hinges, evenly spaced. All modern builds, admittedly.

Fire door regulations, and the fact that modern hinges are inferior to cast iron so you need more of them to slow down wear.

[mrgrimsdale]

Alternatively you could wang it through a dowel plate, without any planing, like this:






If all else fails - it's more common in trad work to find that square pegs were hammered into round holes. They look round cos they are forced into round holes but the giveaway is a little ear at each side, giving the dowel the shape of a corn seed.

[mrgrimsdale]

They are burbling about an "octagonal dowel" over there.
Can be done exactly the same as a round dowel i.e. instead of a circle you draw an octagon at each end of the blank, and join up the lines with a plane. Except that to align the octagons you would start with a planed face side and then draw the octagons with one side lined up with the face.
Ditto for any polygon of your choice.
If you want it tapered e.g. for tool handles you make one octagon smaller than the other.
The only prob is the drawing - a nicely made template might be called for here.

Come to think this could make an interesting planing exercise; producing a selection of bars with different polygonal sections and tapers. Some of these chaps with their million dollar planes could do with an exercise like this!

cheers
Jacob

[smudger]

Duh.
Thanks for that.
I needed to make about 200 14mm pegs (the builder in France had screwed some false beams to the walls but left the clearance holes for me to fill. Cheers.) in oak. It was a bugger - using plug cutters. At one stage my neighbours almost called the fire brigade because of the smoke coming from my shed workshop. I was even thinking of buying a rounding plane. If I had read this earlier I could have done it in just a few minutes - and found a use for all those jewelry-type planes that are lying around the shedworkshop.

[mrspanton]

I've made hundreds of dowels of all diameter's same as your method jacob, except I use a brace and bit to score the diameter on the ends not a wad punch, matches the peg to the holes perfectly. If I want a long section I use a piece of scrap with the relavant sized hole in it and use that as a tepmlate to keep from getting hills or valley's while plaining. Oh and if your draw pegging dont forget to have a long gentle taper on it, not like a paralleel sided sharpened pencil like most peoiple wrongly do.

[mrgrimsdale]

Oct 30, 2008 19:41:40 GMT mrspanton said:

snip
I use a brace and bit to score the diameter on the ends
snip

Brilliant yet so obvious Why didn't I think of that?

cheers
Jacob