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Thread: Dowel Plate Woes

  1. #46
    Join Date
    Dec 2010
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    South Coastal Massachusetts
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    6,824
    Now THAT'S clever, Russ.

    I use one of these. It will work on any diameter dowel.
    Last edited by Jim Matthews; 08-11-2011 at 7:12 AM.

  2. #47
    Join Date
    Sep 2008
    Location
    Rochester, NY
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    681
    Heh, funny to see my old thread resurrected. Dave, I found as you did that removing less material with the dowel plate resulted in better dowels. I started manually paring between the 1/2" and 3/8" (final dimension) stages of the dowel plate. And yes, rive (split) the blanks.

    P1020335.20.jpg P1020366.25.jpg P1020391.20.jpg P1020343.20.jpg

    Thanks for the help!

    Mike

  3. #48
    Join Date
    Jan 2009
    Location
    Williamsburg,Va.
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    12,402
    Everybody,be careful to not hit the dowel plate with a steel hammer. You don't want to dent the edges of the dowel holes.

  4. #49
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Location
    Trussville, AL
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    3,589
    Seems like I saw a suggestion someplace to use a block plane to make the blanks roughly octagonal befor driving them through the plate. Seems like that would get rid of even more material that the plate wouldn't have to deal with...

    Quote Originally Posted by Michael Peet View Post
    Heh, funny to see my old thread resurrected. Dave, I found as you did that removing less material with the dowel plate resulted in better dowels. I started manually paring between the 1/2" and 3/8" (final dimension) stages of the dowel plate. And yes, rive (split) the blanks.

    P1020335.20.jpg P1020366.25.jpg P1020391.20.jpg P1020343.20.jpg

    Thanks for the help!

    Mike

  5. #50
    Join Date
    Aug 2003
    Location
    extreme southeast Nebraska
    Posts
    3,113
    If you will notice in pictures of my dowel plates, I have them mounted on oak and screwed to the oak so they don't move around. This makes for a straighter peg (dowel), and I use a piece of 1/4" brass rod as a punch to finish driving the peg thru till it falls out. I have also found that using a metal hammer to drive the dowels thru the plate goes better than using a wooden mallet as the woods have a spring action and the mallet does not drive the dowels as well as the metal hammer and the wooden mallet also has a tendency to mangle the driven end and often split it beyond salvaging.

    FWIW, I made my dowel plates out of truck leaf springs after annealling them a bit, then rehardening after drilling all the necessary holes and attachment holes. And to save someone the trouble of asking, I just used the black cobalt smithing drill bits with a slow speed and constant pressure and old black thread cutting oil.

    Another trick I use is to taper both ends of a rived peg blank and start it in a slightly larger hole in my dowel plate and tap it lightly to make an impression of size on both ends and then use a block plane or spoke shave to shave a lot of the excess from the blank before driving it through the plates holes.
    Last edited by harry strasil; 08-11-2011 at 11:57 AM.
    Jr.
    Hand tools are very modern- they are all cordless
    NORMAL is just a setting on the washing machine.
    Be who you are and say what you feel... because those that matter... don't mind...and those that mind...don't matter!
    By Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand

  6. #51
    Join Date
    Dec 2005
    Location
    Albuquerque, NM
    Posts
    446
    My tool set also has an LN dowel plate, and I get great results from it -- but, there was a learning curve at first.

    Along with all the other great suggestions already mentioned in the rest of this thread, one of the things that I had to learn, and that I haven't seen here so far, might be of some use: check the grain orientation of the piece of wood you're trying to drive through the dowel plate. It's been my experience that orienting the grain in the same fashion you would if you were hand planing it generally gives better results. Think of the dowel plate as the cutting edge of the plane iron and orient the grain appropriately: visualize the dowel plate as being a stationary hand plane (like a cooper's jointer) and you're moving the wood across the iron -- otherwise the dowel frequently ends up with (a lot of) "tear-out."
    _____

    On another note: Thanks Jr for a great piece of history!!!
    James

    "Uke is always right."
    (Attributed to Ueshiba Morihei)

  7. #52
    Join Date
    Jan 2009
    Location
    Williamsburg,Va.
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    But how can you orient the grain correctly since the dowel plate is cutting ALL of the sides of the dowel at once?????

  8. #53
    Join Date
    Jul 2009
    Location
    Puget Sound, USA
    Posts
    595
    On any given pin, the grain goes in 2 different(opposite) directions, so trying to orient the grain will be mostly futile.

  9. #54
    Join Date
    Jan 2009
    Location
    Williamsburg,Va.
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    The best you can do is split out the dowel blanks. That will give you the most "neutral" grain orientation possible.

  10. #55
    I made a dowel plate from an old circular saw blade. Drilled a hole in it, clamped it over a dog hole in my bench and smashed some riven white oak through it.
    By the time I was done with 8 or 10 pegs the blade was trashed, but it worked just fine for what I needed.
    Paul

  11. #56
    OP, not sure if your expectations are too high. Commercially made dowel is machined and is of course a "perfect" product. and you'll never match that with your bashed dowels.

    Like other posters I have a made on with an old 1/4 lump of steel plate i found.

    the sides of the dowel are often torn, and don't look that great, but they are round.
    as you only see the ends in your joint, they will work just great.

    If i want a 12mm dowel i'll bash it through the 15mm hole, 14mm hole, 13mm hole and then finally the 12.
    Steven Thomas

  12. #57
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Location
    Trussville, AL
    Posts
    3,589
    If I needed a 12 mm dowel, I'd wonder how the heck I wound up in France .

    Quote Originally Posted by Steve Thomas View Post
    OP, not sure if your expectations are too high. Commercially made dowel is machined and is of course a "perfect" product. and you'll never match that with your bashed dowels.

    Like other posters I have a made on with an old 1/4 lump of steel plate i found.

    the sides of the dowel are often torn, and don't look that great, but they are round.
    as you only see the ends in your joint, they will work just great.

    If i want a 12mm dowel i'll bash it through the 15mm hole, 14mm hole, 13mm hole and then finally the 12.

  13. #58
    Quote Originally Posted by Jerome Hanby View Post
    If I needed a 12 mm dowel, I'd wonder how the heck I wound up in France .
    Or unexpectedly orbiting the Sun..

    http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/99...ars.metric.02/

    or not..

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
    Last edited by Caspar Hauser; 08-11-2011 at 9:05 PM.

  14. #59
    Join Date
    Aug 2003
    Location
    extreme southeast Nebraska
    Posts
    3,113
    The oldtimers turned a dowel or used a shaving horse and drawknife, spokeshave and scraper if they needed a chair spindle or some exposed round wood. Mostly pegs (short dowels today) were used to fasten or join joints together in the olden days and they didn't need to be absolutely straight.

    I see in Fine Woodworkings latest e-letter that they have jumped on the wagon about using dowel plates to make pegs and pins.
    Jr.
    Hand tools are very modern- they are all cordless
    NORMAL is just a setting on the washing machine.
    Be who you are and say what you feel... because those that matter... don't mind...and those that mind...don't matter!
    By Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand

  15. #60
    What Dave K said, and others have alluded to -- rive the pins (with a chisel, generally) down to pretty close to the diameter you want. Of course, to do that, you need easily-riven wood, like oak, say. I love my LN dowel plate -- the most fun with a hammer you can have, IMHO. I tried ebony once, but it didn't work out well. It seems to me that if you want the look of ebony, use the Greene & Greene method: use a srtucturally sound wood for the pin, but cap it with the wood that will be the most pleasing for show

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