How To Make Dowels With A Simple Cutter

one of my more popular videos from a few years ago was on making dowels I have kind of a unique way of doing that I make a jig from just a simple piece of ordinary mild steel like this here and it's as simple as drilling three holes and you can make any size dial you want I thought I would go over it again in this video and what I've already done is I've laid out three positions here for drill holes I'm gonna Center punch those marks to begin with these don't have to be super accurate but you want to get it as close you possibly can and then I'm gonna drill a 1/8 inch pilot hole in all three locations and I want this cutter to make 3/8 inch dowels and if you're interested in making this yourself the measurements are on my website in the article that's linked in the description with that done I'm going to step it up to a quarter inch bit and once again drill all three locations [Music] and now finally with the plate clap down tight to the table I'm gonna drill out that center hole with the three-eighths inch bit before I clap the plate down though I want to make sure that the bid is centered on the hole and to do that I'm just going to start it up and let the plate move around a little bit until the drill bit finds the center these are for clearance and without them the cutters not going to work properly next thing I need to do is cut out some stock that's just a little bit bigger than 3/8 and here I'm using a piece of hard maple and now because it's kind of difficult to tilt my saw to 45 degrees I'm just gonna hand playing the corners off you want to remove as much material as you possibly can from the blank before you run it through the cutter first of all it makes the cutting go faster and also you get much better results and then of course the next thing you have to do is make the end of the stock a little bit pointy so it fits in the hole and I've got the cutter plate mounted in my vise vertically and the stock is chucked in the drill and all I need to do is run it through you can go fairly fast as long as this cutting efficiently and the main thing is that you try to hold it as straight as you possibly can and keep them from wobbling around now I'm not sure how many dolls you can actually cut from one of these cutters but I do know that you can sharpen it after it starts to get dull I mean if you find that it's tearing up the wood more than its cutting just take a round chainsaw file and tune up the cutting edge on both sides you know how everything has to be presented as a success on YouTube I gotta try it again but what I think I did wrong was I pushed you hard and this is the results when you push too hard you gotta let the cutter cut so what I'm going to do is I'm going to trim this end off over here I'm gonna resharpen the point again and I'm gonna try it once more [Music] I made a golf key I didn't look at the original video before I started doing this or at least I should have went to the website article and check things there I think probably what's going on now is that the stock is too big seven sixteenths is just a little bit too much meat to take off so what I'm going to do is I'm going to trim it down a little bit closer to 3/8 of an inch and run it through again okay maybe third time's a charm what we'll see [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] okay I did go in look at the article and I figured out what I did wrong the cutter itself appears to be good but what I failed to do was knock the corners off on the stock you really want to have this cutter cutting as little as possible really it's just a fine tuning device to get the dowel to the correct diameter okay fingers crossed this time it's gonna work this time it's gonna work I'm running out of stock here [Laughter] [Applause] come out of there okay a little bit messed up here in the middle and gosh I don't know maybe it's possible that this wood is just too wavy that it should have been something a little bit straighter actually you really want to use wood that's as straight grained as you possibly can I should have been a little bit more selective in fact what I'm gonna do instead of ending this off looking like a total fool that my method doesn't work is I'm gonna get another piece of wood and I gotta try it again and see how it works maybe it's the wood what is the variable thing they're not all the same that's the fun part working with it okay a little bit shaky at the start but then it smooth right out not that this dowels is as smooth as the ones I've done before I don't know what it is the cutter is the right geometry there could be something else at play here this is the same wood except I looked at it and made sure that it was straighter grain like it's the same maple I don't know if it's from the same board obviously but it's the same maple as the other one except this one cut a lot smoother it's still not perfectly smooth but still in all I got good results and it's straight like it's a nice straight Dell so I'm gonna call it a success even though it kind of feels like a failure

Channel: John Heisz - Speakers and Audio Projects

Views: 393,762

Keywords: woodworking, how to, diy, make, maker, making, i build it, john heisz

Id: bmQ2gDQhXXU

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 22 2019