How To Make Pinch Rods With Sliding Dovetail REED Planes Design

hey y'all i'm james wright and welcome my shop today we are making sliding dovetail pinch rods this is a design from reed plains and it is really really cool it's got a couple innovations but we'll get to that a little later let's dive into making these so reid plains has done it again and he has created some more plans this time for a really interesting design for pinch rods and he sent me a preliminary kit so we're gonna have fun making that today i'm gonna start with some hard maple i want something that is relatively easy to work but is very sturdy because they're gonna be some small pieces of this and when you're working with small pieces you need them to be something that has some structural strength hard maple is usually the first one that comes to mind for that though there are many others you want something that is diffuse porous smooth wood planes well but still resilient and doesn't dent up in scratch so i'm going to start by ripping off really thin strips of this and then i can cut them to length i find that the the actual smoothing and detailing of them works better with smaller pieces but the larger pieces it's easier just to rip them all as one big thing so then we can actually plane them down to their final thickness and hit that marking gauge line until they're exactly where we want them to be and this is always the the pleasing part where you're getting things close to the dimension they should be and everything's looking good at this point and you don't really see the disaster that's about to happen when working with fence things sometimes i put them between dogs sometimes i have to put another stop on there so that my dogs can actually reach sometimes i'll just do them freehand sometimes i'll put down double-sided tape every piece is a little bit different so we're going to take these thin ripped pieces and rip those down into even smaller pieces sometimes it's easier to rip those vertically in the vise and i would do that with a pole saw usually but a lot of times it's easier to rip them lengthwise at the at the bench hook but in this case it's about six and one half dozen other and i ended up using the the pole saw method you just raise them up a few inches at a time and they will cut right down and it's one of the great uses for a pole saw anytime you're working with thin stock small pieces this is really where it shines and becomes a very useful piece so once we get them ripped and ripped again to the right thickness and width then we can start working on cutting these down into little dovetails this is where the problem really started coming out is i'm trying to figure out how do i hold these pieces and plane an angle on them and so i try just holding them between dogs but they're a little too small for that i've tried free handing them and they're a little too small for that but using the bridge city block plane with the adjustable sides actually works really well for this the original idea this is the cross section of the beam is to have a base piece and then another piece glued on here another piece glued on here so you could cut the grooves separate of that the problem is that i need to cut a taper on one side of this and doing that accurately along the whole length is becoming incredibly difficult so my initial idea was i'm just going to cut a sliding dovetail on one big piece and so i'm actually going to go back and do that instead so we're going to start back at the full-size board that's three-quarter inch wide i'm going to start by putting a groove down the middle and the the groove is the the smaller dimension of the dovetail this will actually give me most of the cutout i need to now if i had an electric router once i have this groove in i'd come in with the electric router and a dovetail bit and go yeah and be done with it it would be a nice clean one but we're going to do this with hand tools and there's a bunch of different ways of cutting that back i could and i originally tried i'll thought i would use the the side rabbit plane which allows you to cut in the side and that actually works relatively well though most people don't have it and it didn't work quite as well as i wanted to so then i thought well let's just freehand it and cut back in with the chisel and surprisingly this worked really really well it's a little bit tedious as you have to go along it bit by bit but with a larger chisel it actually works out really well and this is the method i ended up using and i i really like it it came out very very well i wasn't sure if this is the method i actually want to use but after experimenting with a bunch of things we learned quite a few things along the way to make these plans so after getting really frustrated with this and deciding to go off camera and working on it on my own time we found that there are a few ways and jeff actually captured those to make the small pieces in the plans but on this one i decided to go the method of cutting the groove in so i did it the same way we did before with cutting the groove and then chiseling back in that's where we're going to take this from i ended up making the groove a little bit wider than the plans and i think i regret that the pieces on the side are a little weak i thought maybe that might give me a little more wiggle room but if i had to make it again i would probably just follow the the plans that we came up with that's a little bit smaller group so now that we have the dovetail sliding dovetail groove cut we can rip this off and then cut it to length i'm starting with 12 inch long sticks so that will end up giving me about 20 inches that i can fit in the pinch rods but with the sticks coming out the side that means that i have about 11 inches of expansion and contraction after ripping them down we can come back and clean off the backside and it's a lot easier to work with these pieces than it is to work with the smaller pieces if you find yourself a plane just being a little bit harder to push put a little wax in the bottom it's amazing how smooth it can be using a bit of a simple hard paste wax can do an amazing job on there a lot of people like oil and i have a few videos on different types and different uses now we also need to make a few small pieces that slide inside jeff actually recommended that they be made out of laminated wood so you take veneers and laminate them up and that would probably be the better way to go but i thought you know let me give it a try with doing some hardwood don't do it that way use some laminated wood or in this case i actually used a small piece of aluminum for one of them but having a solid piece you really run into issues i needed to cut that dovetail that then slides in and so it's very easy to put the block plane upside down and then cut it at the angle it needs to be and then we can cut off these small pieces shape them and fit them in and here's where i started to run into the next problem one of these we need to drill a hole through and tap and if i had made them out of laminated wood as the plans exp say i wouldn't have so many problems but i decided it's hard maple i can do that so we're going to try and make it out of that you need four of them that fit in each end as a plug you need one that is free sliding down the middle and then you need another one that's double sided that connects the two pieces together so for the two pieces i actually worked out pretty well on this you cut two small pieces and you glue them together face to face and you have a double dovetail so it slides in both dovetails a little bit of glue a little bit of clamping and let it set aside and this actually works really well the laminated wood would probably would have been a little cleaner and a little easier probably hold up better in the long run so yeah follow the plans i'm experimenting and playing that's what a lot of this is so i'm going to use the the wood glue to hold it but then i'll put a little bit of ca on there to just make it come together quicker so i can actually use it clean off the extra glue and that's basically ready to use it's just a simple block that will then get a screw put into it i want to clean off all the extras and a lot of times when you're cleaning small pieces it's very very easy to just do it on a file rather than trying to plane it or chisel it and a good set of piles of files can do an amazing thing so this will slide in one side and then the other side will then catch into it i found that there are a few spots where rubbing a little bit in the dovetail and if you find that then it's very very easy to just come back and chisel it out as you did before for the end blocks i decided to use a little bit of ca glue they don't really have a lot of pressure so ca glue works really well i'm going to glue up one block on either end separately and then that allows me to smooth them down plane them and get them just right i'm going to leave the other end open so that we can work on that because we still need to put the small pieces in so into the double sliding bit you're going to need to pre-drill a hole through that allows you to then put in a small brass screw that comes with the kit you can taper the back so the head recesses in and then you have this tiny little screw that goes through into it and holds it on one end of the stick now you could glue it in place but it makes it much easier to take this apart if you can take that screw out and be able to slide those blocks around so yes screw it in don't don't glue it in you'll you'll probably regret that in the future and with that now these two sticks can slide against each other if they're a little stiff again you can go back and clean those out the kit comes with this brass knob and that allows you to run a set screw into it and basically turn this into a bolt i was having a little bit of problem with the the free tapping of it so i ended up coming in with the drill and yeah here you can see another problem i didn't have it quite perfectly square and so it's ever so slightly out of center if you have a drill bit if you have a drill press use the drill press it works so much better with that i don't have a good drill press for that but you can put in the set screw and then punch around it and that will actually lock it in place and basically turns it into a bolt this bolt goes through the first rod and then into a small piece that runs in the second rod this is what actually will lock the two together so they don't move when you want to capture the measurement and yeah small piece we got a problem there so tapping that little tiny wooden piece it's not going to happen we're going to make that instead of a piece of aluminum so with the small piece of aluminum i am going to cut that down to be ever so slightly wider than the widest point of the dovetail this will allow me to file it back to exactly the right thickness and i did a lot of the deburring freehand but i found it much much easier to then lock it in a pair of vice grips and then file it down and this actually allowed me to match up the dovetail angle and i went back and forth until i found that it just slid in there i want it to be a little bit loose because it is going to pull it in but i do want to be able to slide from one end to the other next we need to put a center point on it and then drill a hole and tap this because that bolt goes through one rod and then taps into this and again it'd be better to do this on a drill press this time i was a little more careful making sure i drilled it vertical i'm going to clean off the burrs and then we can test it and make sure that it will run nicely on the bolt because we need to be able to tighten and loosen this regularly during normal use and yes i am a nut or at least i made a nut and these work pretty well they're a little bit stiff there's a few places i have to clean them up but now that they're all cleaned up we can start gluing in the end pieces and getting these all fitting in right on one end we can glue them in then once these are cleaned once they're in we can come back and clean them off and it's really easy to hit them with a chisel or shooting board on the other piece we have that screw that goes through the tapered hole and then into the block that doesn't move so one end gets locked into that double-ended dovetail and the other one goes through with the bolt and then locks into that and these two slide together so you can then tighten it down and there it doesn't move so you can move it or not move it hey so on the end of this i need to put in this insert so that i can thread in end points the problem is that's a really delicate little fit and this can be hard to get in there now the plans actually have a whole jig set up to drill that hole perfectly but i'm going to go somewhere else and i'm probably going to end up regretting it but i'm just going to freehand drill those holes so we center out a punch hole on there and then i use a brad point drill bit to drill out the hole when i put in the insert i want to make sure that it is spreading lengthwise and not across i don't want to be busting this piece apart and so i'm having the pressure go lengthwise on it we can tap it down and it's it's fairly easy to freehand but it ends up being much much easier to put a bolt in it and then tap the bolt down into place that works really really well and when it comes to filling this head i'm going to use the most evil route possible that annoys the most number of people epoxy yes i'm going to be using some epoxy on this one i'm going to do another one in the future here's another set of pinch rods that we're going to be doing and i'll do a domed wooden cap for that one but for this one mixing up some five minute epoxy putting a little bit of coloring into it and then filling it up and i'm just working until it just touches the sides and that's all we need now we need to work on the little pieces that screw into the end so we have exact measurements and for that the kit comes with a set of bolts that you can modify to whatever method you want there are two different sets that come with it and there are a bunch of different recommendations on how you can shape the end to get exactly what you want on one of mine i have them tapered into a pin and the other one i have set up with washers i'll show you those in a minute after that it's on to finishing and we just need to do a lot of the little detail pieces to clean it up chamfer all the edges break down all the corners and just do the little touches that need to be done before you apply the finish speaking of finish boiled linseed oil uh happiness uh yeah could you expect me doing anything else i mean it doesn't really pop out much on maple it's one of the reasons why i don't use maple that much because it just doesn't i'm not a huge fan of the color and there's not a lot of grain in it but it's a very good durable wood after that has cured and the paste wax is on there we can then screw it all back together here you can see with the epoxy on i actually like how the cap came out it's a really nice clean design with a touch of color and it fits out really well and with that it's basically done here's the washes i'm talking about with what are those washers for so why do we have the washers in the end when we also have these that have a point that can fit into a drawer bottom well this will give you an accurate measurement for a drawer opening so if i've got a drawer opening here i need to know how wide this is so i can make the drawer exactly i could pull out a tape measure but also the other thing i want to know is the gapping so i have space for the drawer to go in so if i extend this out and then lock this down i have two measurements here number one is the outside of the washer to the outside of the washer that is the width of the drawer opening but i also have inside of the drawer to inside of the washer and having the inside measurement gives me the exterior dimension of the drawer so now i have already accounted for the gap i need on both sides for the door to slide and i can take this over and measure exactly the measurement of the drawer outside outside of the drawer to fit into this opening so then we also have these little ends that you can put on there and this will allow you to get into a drawer slot so if you've created your drawer and you need to figure out how big does the drawer bottom need to be now we can loosen this up slide them out fit them into the drawer bottom tighten this down turn it bring it out and now i have the exact measurement for how wide my drawer bottom needs to be so it can fit into that groove that i just measured pinch rods this project was definitely a challenge but well worth it and a lot of fun i really like how it came out and i have several projects coming up where i'm going to need a set of pinch rods so stay tuned for that happy so there you have it i i really love this design pinch rods are one of those cool things and this particular design with the double dovetail slide is just absolutely ingenious and you can make them any length you want the nice thing with ends is you can change them out and put different types on there or different applications for it really really cool design now jeff is actually providing plans to these and you can find those down below he's also selling the kits where you can buy the brass pieces as well as all the hardware so you can buy that as one piece and soon he's probably going to come out with another set that have a slightly different hardware onto it there's a bunch of different applications for these and it's just kind of cool i really like what he's doing with that but if you want the plans for it they're available i'll leave links to that down below or you can buy the kits on the website woodbuyright.com yeah this is really really cool i've wanted a good set of pinch rods for a while and there's a couple different designs coming out for them and uh yeah it's one of those tools that you don't need very often but when you need to measure from distance to distance inside and you want a reality marking rather than trying to bend a tape measure that's really just key so i hope you like this if you do have any thoughts comments ideas things i could have done better this one was really a learning experience trying to figure out different ways of doing it and jeff and i have captured that in the plans he did an amazing job of drawing those out if you have other suggestions that leave those down in the comments down below we do read through them and that does mean a lot so thank you for that also if you do comment down below or hit like comment share subscribe that really does help out the channel it gets us in front of more people and it helps us grow so thank you for that that does mean a lot if you want to take it one step farther there are a bunch of people scrolling over here on the side they are patrons on patreon they are the ones who quite literally keep this channel going we are supported by you the viewer without patrons or members people who click that little join button down below we wouldn't be here so if you want to financially help the channel you can do that through patreon or buying something on the website or click the little join button all of those thank you that means more than i can say i think that'll do it for now and until next time have a wonderful day the real reason for pinch rods is it measures out a specific amount of seasoning you know a pinch of salt now you know how much that is

Channel: Wood By Wright How To

Views: 15,699

Keywords: Wood By Wright, wood By Wright 2, Hand tools, Handtools, Woodworking, woodworking, Hand tool, Hand Tools, Hand plane, Hardwood, Hardwoods, Reed Planes, pinch rods, pinch rod, sliding dovetail, pinch rod kit, tool kit, diy kit

Id: 0IVhO6YC5fg

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2022