Make Wood Dowels In 10 Seconds!

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh that hurt all right splinter to the nose anyway today guys i want to share with you the greatest woodworking hack you've never seen are you ready for this so as i mentioned i think i mentioned it in previous videos that my my dad and i had a cabinet business for 15 years together where we did really high-end cabinet projects when we did projects for homes that were multi-million dollar homes and then we did you know just your basic regular household cabinets as well but we really liked the high-end projects just because we could get more creative with those and it's kind of funny because a lot of people don't like working a lot of father and sons they butt heads and have a hard time working together but even before that my dad and i had worked together when we worked for other people for probably five years before that and even when we just when i was living at home as a child my dad always had a workshop out back and i'd go out back and learn and work with my dad so i've always enjoyed working with my dad instead of butting heads with him and people used to ask us that when they'd come into the shop they'd say don't y'all ever have problems kind of interesting a father and son and i always explain to them we've had no problems as long as he does exactly what i tell him to do we get along just fine but my dad he a pretty smart filler and he would come up with a lot of really cool ideas whenever we were you know through the process of being in the business and everything and i remember like one time we had a project come up where we needed poles that were it was like it was a bathroom cabinet but it needed to look like it was made out of bamboo and so he took a drill and mounted it and made a little mini lathe for us that we used at the shop saved us several hundred dollars on that particular project we used it a couple more times whenever we needed something we never turned any pins with it though but anyway he's always been very good at coming up with really good ideas you've seen him in some of the videos before [Music] even though you don't see him on this channel actually he's pretty big part of this channel because he does a lot of figuring out for me uh anything i need to build or come up with a plan for i'll go to him and let him draw out the plan for me or i run it past him to see what he thinks is a good idea just because he's done it longer than i have and done more than i have it's kind of funny because even in one of the even in one of my videos where i was testing i was comparing the table saw to the track saw which one should get first and somebody commented on that video you know people need to get away from youtube and you need to get out and really learn stuff he was basically saying i think from what i gathered i didn't know what i was talking about which is funny because after building furniture and cabinets and all kinds of woodworking for 20 years and my dad doing it for what 40 years or more apparently i still don't have enough knowledge but anyway i've been talking long enough what i want to tell you about is one really cool idea that my dad came up with maybe somebody else has done this before i've never seen it done before and i can't even remember what the project was that we needed this for uh whether it was like straight up dowels that we needed or what but we needed them out of something was probably out of walnut and i'll show you kind of on a small scale here the way you can do this and basically what it is is a way to make dowels out of any type of wood you want without a lathe super fast and super easy so i'll get it set up now and i'll kind of explain to you how this works for demonstration purposes i'm going to use this piece of cedar that i have left over from a previous project and i'm going to set my table saw up to a half inch [Music] [Music] what i did here was to cut a half inch this is just half inch all the way around and whenever i cut like a long a small skinny piece like this that's long i just you know this is what we've always done i just leave that in long and then i'll go back and this so overall length of this thing is far longer than i need and this can just be cut off and that way i don't have to use a push stick or anything or get anywhere near the you know closer to the blade than i want to get even though it's a saw stop i wouldn't lose my finger but i would have to replace the the stop block and i don't want to have to do that [Applause] next thing we have to do is take our stick and you can take a sander if you want to use a sander we had a belt sander wide belt sander or excuse me an edge sander that we would take it over to and just kind of round the edge i'm just going to take my knife because what you want to do is take you want to round it off a little bit [Music] you need both ends of the piece of wood that you're going to be using to be rounded off so you know obviously you want this to be six inches longer overall than what you're going to want and i'm not going to need any of this because i'm just going to be using it for demonstration now on to the next piece of the must [Music] by now you may have figured out how this is all going to work we're going to turn dowels with a tap and die set specifically the die set because uh as my good friend wharf would say today is a good day to die use that use a die anyway i don't want anyway let's go take your die wrench and i'm going to be using the half inch die obviously that's why i cut everything at a half inch and these just have a little set screw so obviously you're kind of limited in how big you can make these by the size of the die that you have and also the size of the drill you know i've got i can put a half inch uh drill bit in there so ergo vis-a-vis i can put a half inch dowel in the end of my drill so that's what we're going to be making today is a half inch dowel well actually we're not going to be making a half inch dial but i'll explain that in a moment anyway as i saw the way my dad did this we we didn't have a we didn't have a vice there we didn't really have much of a use for a vise and my vise here is not connected i don't haven't put it together yet it's in pieces up underneath the bench so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to drill a hole in a 2x4 and then i'm going to clamp that two by four two set bench and anyway i'll show you how this works just happen to have a two by four right there handy how about that folks half inch drill bit because this is a half inch this wrench i already measured that i'm sorry it's all a show folks it's all a show [Music] all right then you can take your die wrench and drop it down in the hole there i'm just going to hold that with a quick clamp open your drill up into the end of the drill tighten it down put the other end in the die and away we go [Music] [Applause] when you have the length you need just go cut it off [Music] [Applause] once you do have everything cut down to the size you want and put it back in the drill then you just take a piece of sandpaper basically just like you would on a lathe if a smooth finish is what you want you can do that and now you have an approximate half inch dowel it doesn't work out quite right to a half inch so you have to kind of go bigger go big or go home this ended up being actually 3 8. so running i cut this to a half inch square all around ran it through a half inch die came out with 3 8 inch dowel and you may be asking yourself what is this good for me well actually there's any number of uses that you could use this for perhaps you have a need did i just say perhaps perhaps you have a need for such an occasion as to need a dowel to a particular size also a good thing that these could be used for is loose tenons for joinery go ahead and make your long bowel and then cut them into the tendon pieces i think probably maybe what we use these for was actually plugs and you can get a plug cutter for a drill which is very simple you just cut you know you drill if you haven't ever seen one uh it looks kind of like a forstner bit and it leaves a plug there and it cuts a circle out around it then you pass it through the saw blade through table saw and the plugs drop off but that's kind of a hassle that you lose the plugs but you do get an exact size so that may be another use for this and if you don't have a tap and die set you know you can get you know if you know that you want a half inch you can get the wrench and the die for probably 15 bucks or less to do these and depending on what your needs are it could be well worth that when it comes down to it though what is the real hack well the real hack may not be how to turn dowels or plugs or loose tenons with a tap and die set the real hack may be listening to people that may know more than you know on any project if you have somebody especially like i have my dad i can go to somebody that can throw out an idea even if it's somebody that doesn't typically do this because you just get into the mindset of oh i've done this before this is what i need to do this somebody else can come at it from a different angle and really have a good idea and really save you perhaps save your money or save your skin on a project i like projects like this too because you know this is not what this is made for i like trying to figure out ways to do things that are not meant to be done using tools for what tools are not made to do sometimes the best tool is not the tool that was made to do what you needed to do but in fact the tool made to do something else and i will see you next time

Channel: HAXMAN

Views: 455,718

Keywords: woodworking hack, woodworking, wood dowels, diy wood dowels, making loose tenons, diy loose tenons, loose tenons, best woodworking hack, crazy woodworking hack, amazing woodworking, wood shop, tap and die, tap and die hack

Id: GibpR0mUvQw

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021