Dowel Plate Woes

[Harlan Barnhart]

Harry, you're like the MacGuyver of woodworking. I think with some wood and your tools you could make just about anything. The world needs more guys like you.

So true. If a nuclear physicist or a brain surgeon should wander onto this site and post some pictures of the tools they use, I imagine Mr. Strasil would soon post pictures of similar tools he forged himself...

[harry strasil]

FWIW, I find the dowels go thru the holes easier if I hold onto the dowel while pounding it thru.

[Michael Peet]

FWIW, I find the dowels go thru the holes easier if I hold onto the dowel while pounding it thru.

That's how I ended up with my blood blister, LOL. Well, that combined with bad aim ...

I spent some more time last night working on this technique. Used a 5-lb sledge and tried to focus on hitting it squarely and evenly. Had some better luck. Also had really decent results on some bits of cherry, leading me to believe this could be easier with the harder woods.

Thanks everyone for all your input.

Mike

[Bob Strawn]

I'm just passing info I gleaned from already written old books, I like to read, and collect every old technical manual I can.

You have my gratitude for passing on such data, now I am going to have to make myself a dowel plate!

Bob

[NICK BARBOZA]

I used my LN dowel plate this weekend for the first time. It worked great! I needed some cocobolo pegs for a table I am building. I cut the pieces 3/8" square then planed them in a "v-block" to make them octagonal. after that I just pounded it through the plate.

This post had put fear in me that it wouldnt work well for what I was expecting. But i was pleasantly surprised at my success. As previously stated, it was by no means clean enough to leave exposed but as a peg for a tenon, it is perfect.

Cheers,
NWB

[Don Rogers]

I have not used dowels very much but would like to know -

In making a dowel plate, what hole sizes are recommended? Nominal, Undersize, or oversize?

In other words, will a dowel made in a 1/4" nominal size hole be a good fit for a 1/4"hole drilled in the wood or does the dowel plate hole need to be slightly under or over-sized? Perhaps this also depends on the kind of wood used for both.

DonR

[harry strasil]

driving thru a hole has a tendency to compress the dowel a bit. fwiw

[harry strasil]

A Dowel or peg Box has been mentioned several times in this thread, for those that don't know what one is, here is mine, I has 2 V grooves in it, a small and a large, with a 1/4 inch dowel or pin drove into the end as a stop . The little plane is a dowel or peg fluting plane with a sharp 60 degree Vee included angle cutter.

[Don Rogers]

Thanks Harry,

Your dowel block is also something useful to me - not only for dowels but also for removing the corners of a square block before working it on the lathe.

You keep posting pictures of your homemade tools but I 'm not sure I have the time to make all of them. I'll keep trying.

Please show us some more.

DonR

[Dominic Greco]

A Dowel or peg Box has been mentioned several times in this thread, for those that don't know what one is, here is mine, I has 2 V grooves in it, a small and a large, with a 1/4 inch dowel or pin drove into the end as a stop . The little plane is a dowel or peg fluting plane with a sharp 60 degree Vee included angle cutter.

Very practical and I bet it's easy to use as well!

[george wilson]

Is it necessary to use a 5# hammer? Use of too heavy a hammer doesn't help your aim.

[Dave Cav]

I just ran across this thread this afternoon while I was trying to make some ebony pins for breadboard ends. Good information. I made a dowel plate out of a piece of 3/8" mild steel plate with a 1/4" hole drilled in it. I figured out Harry's V-groove peg box on my own, but until reading through the thread it didn't occur to me to do the pins in stages. I drilled another hole in the plate 17/64" and hammered them through that one first. It did make the final 1/4" pins a bit cleaner and smoother. I was using small ball pien hammer (about 12 oz) so a huge hammer isn't necessary. I also found if you hold the stock straight up and down while driving it through it usually does go straighter. I put the plate over a dog hole in my bench and drove them down through that.

Ebony is difficult to successfully use for pins. I had about a 40% reject rate and the wood kept splitting; I found if I kept my stock to about 2" long it worked a lot better and wasted less. I also made some out of sapele and it worked fine.

And, I also have a blood blister on my left ring finger fingernail...

[george wilson]

You are supposed to taper the holes in a dowel plate. Use a taper reamer,not one that is extremely tapered,though. Those "repairman's" reamers that General sells are too tapered. I would use what is called a "taper pin reamer". Trouble is,you might not be able to find one handy,or know what they look like. They come in different size ranges,and were used for reaming out tapered holes for putting tapered pins in to hold handles on lathes and other machine uses. Then,everyone started using those ugly coiled pins,and quit using taper pin reamers. another way to cheapen work,in my opinion.

Taper pin reamers have ABOUT the same taper as a violin peg.

Anyhow,when you sharpen the dowel plate by grinding the top surface a little,it doesn't enlarge the holes too radically, and the tapered hole gives a sharper(less than 90 º) cutting edge to the dowel plate.

[David Keller NC]

Dave - What George said is good advice, particularly if you're using a hard, brittle wood (like ebony). This is one reason that you might want to spring for Lie-Nielsen's dowel plate if you're going to be regularly making pins.

Here's another couple of tips, though, that might substantially improve your success rate. The first one is to rive your pins. While you can make a pin out of sawn blanks, the failure rate is a lot higher. The second is a bit fancier: after you roughly rive and whittle your pins, chuck them in a universal chuck brace (preferably one with a 10" or 12" throw), and spin the blank as you lean on the brace to drive it through the dowel plate. I've not had one split by doing this (in contrast to driving the pins with a wooden mallet).


If you don't have a brace or just prefer to drive the pins through with a hammer, consider using a wooden or urethane faced hammer instead of a metal one, and chamfer the sharp edge at both ends of the pin before you drive it through the plate. While doing that won't eliminate splitting entirely, it does help.

[paul cottingham]

I mounted mine in my bench top. I mortised the top just enough that the plat sits flush with the top, and drilled out the bench underneath, Works great. The pegs aren't perfectly round, but they work great.