Making Dowels with a Homemade Dowel Plate

this week's video is a simple one it's something I need to remake and it's a dowel plate for making your own doubts it's not actually a dowel plate yet but it will be so keep watching and making your own dowels it is a handy thing to be able to do because if you go to the hardware store there's not really much choice here in Australia it's pine or Tasmanian oak and that's pretty well it being able to make your own dowels you can choose what timber you make me from so if you've got a dowel that's exposed in a joint you could contrast that with the lighter against dark wood or whatever the choice is limitless so what they're also very easy to make all you need is a piece of steel and any piece of still work you just need it to be around about three mil thick or an eighth of an inch and that will do the job this one here I made a few years ago and it's been used quite a few times now and as you can see it's got all bent and walked and it actually still does work when I made it I didn't put any effort in I just grabbed a scrap of angle iron and I just drilled a series of holes in smaller increments and then would just take a piece of square stock that we prepare slightly bigger than the dowel we want and we'll just trim it up through each hole until we get it down and they come out pretty good as well and if you work chuck them up in the drill with a bit of sandpaper you can clean them right up and they can look very nice so I'm making the new and active a thicker piece of steel this is about 10 mil thick or 3/8 of an inch it's two inches wide or 50 mil and I've just cut it to 180 mm in length so I've made a template I thought it was easier to space this out on the computer so that's what I've done and I'll make the download available as well if anybody else wants to make one of these I'm making the series of holes go down in half mil increments and the reason for that is I'll be able to take one final pass and just take off half a mil and that should leave a nice clean finish so that's what I'm hoping we'll see how that turns out the holes range from six mil up to 13 mil and the two outside ones are for fixing the pike down and I'll drill those with the five mil bit and countersink it afterwards with a larger drill bit but while I've got the five mil bit in I'm gonna drill a pilot hole in the rest of the holes a couple of the holes had burrs on and I thought that just take those off with this old sharpening stone it's not that important it would work it as it was but I may as well just clean it up a little bit the dowel plate itself is finished and to use it you line up the hole you need over the top of one of the dog holes in your bench and then hand mr. Stockbridge but I'm gonna map this one on a block [Music] [Applause] another way you can use this is rather than knock the square stop through the holes you can chuck it up in your drill and then turn it into the holes and that does the job as well just need to chip a little bit off the end just so we can get a start into the hole and to chuck it up into the drill we'll need to do both ends it's not very easy to put something that square inside a chuck and keep it centered so this is what I've been doing I would just be knocking it so far through just to get a start you only knock it sort of that far it's easy enough to get back out and I'm jumping a couple holes here and now that's round enough to put in the Chuck [Music] hi my name's Neil and I like to collect dowels well that's a big improvement over the last one but there's a couple of things I need to point out when using the drill I found while making these that the hardest of the hardwoods they split they twisted and split but those hard words actually worked very well by banging them through and they came out very clean where I found the soft woods and the softer of the hardwoods came out cleaner with the drill so one way or another they worked very well so just finding it out by using it and another point I need to make is when you select your timber you need to try and find some straight grain if it's not straight grain there's a chance it will break and split and if you really want strong dowels then the way to do it is to write for the wood and split it with the grain and it will be even stronger hopefully you enjoyed it if you did please like and subscribe and I'll see you on the next one you

Channel: Pask Makes

Views: 1,199,052

Keywords: dowels, dowel plate, making dowels, wooden dowels, dowel rods, dowel pin, hardwood dowel, homemade dowels, homemade, cheap wooden dowels, dowel jig

Id: -CG1XO08ByA

Length: 7min 45sec (465 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2017