Drawbore Pin Help!

straight grained stock

Jack Guzman from Maine

>I haven't gotten around to buying a dowel plate yet.I drilled a hole into a piece of thick plate steel and clamp it in a vise. I cut my stock about twice as long as needed. I use a knife blade and hammer to rive the stock into small pieces. Straight grained stock is needed. The wood split follows the grain mostly but will drift. I steer the knife edge some to keep the pieces uniform in thickness. Finally, I whittle the end to a taper that will fit in the hole,insert it and then drive it through the hole with a metal hammer. Aim is a little important here also. The piece will go through uneven and break if it's not held straight and hit straight on. If the grain is wavy the piece will come out wavy. I hope this helps.---Jack

Re: Drawbore Pin Help!

Stephen Shepherd in the State of Deseret

>Chuck,

I don't know about the LN dowel plate, it might need some attention, only seen pictures. My plate is made from a section of wagon wheel tire and is wrought iron. I have several sized holes for making the pins and several matching holes that put grooves in the pins. I made that by peening the hole then cutting the burr with a cold chisel. The un-grooved holes are lightly peened to make the opening slightly smaller than the hole, so the pegs are a bit undersized and easily fall out of the dowel plate on the under side.

I start with the biggest hole that the split (and splitting is necessary to insure straight grain) will not slip through and pound it through, then I go down to the next size hole. So I am only taking off a bit each pass. And continue until it is the right size. I then pound it easily through the serated hole to groove its length.

I also break a number of pegs in the process, so I make extras. Make sure your mallet head is smooth; dents, glue and other things can cause it to break pegs like a dirty hammer head bends nails.

Hope that helps. Good Luck.

Stephen

Re: Drawbore Pin Help!

hunter

>i use oak straight from the firewood pile, have had an offcut of nice straight grained white oak that i have been making pins from for a while. no dowel plate needed. i split it out with a chisel, then either whittle it to size with a chisel or also made a small groove in a piece of scrap to hold it an use a block plane to round it off. actually i dont really round it it is more like an octagon. i think that the facets grab the wood better. have even left it nearly square when i made a door from soft pine, drove it in and you have square pegs in a round hole, looks good to my eye.

Dowels versus Pins

Warren in Lancaster, Pa

>A dowel is made to join two pieces that have matching holes. It has to be round, straight, and of even and precise diameter to have an end glued into each hole. A pin for a tenon is usually tapered and faceted.

I can't recall seeing pins in old work, whether it be furniture or barn timbers, that had marks of a dowel plate. They look like they were tapered and rounded with a chisel or a plane.

A spindle for the back of a chair is much stronger if made from riven stock. In this case, runout of grain, even over a length of four inches or more, can lead to failure. In a pinned tenon, on the other hand, the forces are concentrated in very small areas at the interface of the mortise and tenon walls. As one might expect, failure in pins is directly across the grain. I think it good practice to have relativley straight grain stuff, but riven stock is not necessary.

The borg (!) to the rescue

wilbur

>This is definitely not historically correct, but when I drawbored the mortise and tenon joints for my worktable, I went to the borg and bought some 1/4 and 3/8" oak rods that they have in the molding section. I cut them down to about an inch longer than I needed, tapered one end, and used them that way. I didn't have a single failure of the pins while assembling the joints. In fact, the pins were strong enough that I blew out the back side of some of the joints with the pin and some overenthusiastic hammering.

Are these pins completely straight grained? Probably not as much as rived pins made with a dowel plate, but at a thickness of 1/4-3/8", any cross grain probably would have caused the rod to fail in the manufacturing process.

Other blasphemy

Christopher Schwarz

>I really like using chopsticks to pin my drawbores. The bamboo is tough stuff. The square shape can be a nice look.

Chris

Re: Dowels versus Pins

Paul Kierstead

>I *think* the riving requirement is a consequence of using the dowel plate.

I'll happily bow to your knowledge on traditional techniques for pinning tenons, but assuming we are not pining (I can't help it!) for historical accuracy, do you see any reason you see why we shouldn't use dowels for the pins?

Re: Dowels versus Pins

Warren in Lancaster, Pa

>It is good to have a nice full length taper to the pins so that there is a gentle wedging action drawing the joint tight. Also if the pin is tapered it will fill the hole nicely at the end. I think it is much faster to saw out the pins than to split them and then send through the dowel plate. If you have a faster way to make dowels or are buying dowels, they are not otherwise inferior once they are tapered.

Thanks!

Paul Kierstead

>I just picked up a dowel plate on the weekend and now you tell me it is slow :) I have seen people use them very quickly, so perhaps it can be convient; I am not so much of a rush anyway, so I'll give it a swing and see if it works for me. I am a slow turner, so doing them on the lathe has proven brutally slow. The dowel making jig thingie that LV sells is a bit rough sometimes. I'll give this a swing and also try it by eye.

One question though: You say 'full length taper', so I take it you are thinking of applications where one side is hidden? Or am I misunderstanding? I suspect having two sides visible with pinned joints might be a bother.

Re: Drawbore Pin Help!

markfromsacramento

>Regarding the dowel plate. I've used the dowel plate twice with mixed results. The first disaster was trying to produce some 3/8 in dowels out of cherry. They would have been usable if they would have been hidden but had so much tearout that I couldn't use them because I wanted the ends exposed and a bit proud (I did not rive the cherry first). As a sidenote, I tried to step down the dowels by using progressively smaller dowelplate holes but found that it didn't work because there weren't enough intermediately sized holes and I ended up destroying the dowel. I was able to produce some 1/8in. ebony pegs that were about 1 1/2in. long without too many lost pegs but the sizing was critical. I ended up having the best luck by sizing a piece of stock barely over the 1/8 square and then rounding over most of the corners by moving the longer piece against a sanding drum. I then cut the pegs into 2 inch pieces and drove them through the dowel plate.

back of joint

Warren in Lancaster, Pa

>Paul, I think you have to use some judgement here. On an old cabinet door the pin often appears bigger on the outside than the inside because the pin enlarges the hole somewhat. Because of the taper the pins can easily be knocked out for repair (hitting from the back). On something like a table where the back side is hidden the pins can be somewhat sloppy. On a barn joint with 8x8 timbers the pins sometimes do not fill up the hole on the far side and sometimes are never cut flush either.

Also the amount of offset and the amount of taper can vary between different woods according to how easily they crush and deform.

So it's not just me! Thanks.

Chuck Nickerson

>Chris made it look so easy in the DVD. I think I'll do my prototypes with chopsticks. If they look as good as my sketches, then I'll figure out how to make the pins I need.

Turning Dowels

PHil Joines Krum, Tx

>A quick way to make consistent diameter dowels on the lathe is to make a special tool. Get an open end wrench of the size needed. Grind the short jaw to a cutting edge. Rough turn the stock a little oversize. Hold the long jaw of the wrench against the top side of the stock and feed in letting the sharp jaw cut to diameter.

A lot of times the cut will be fairly rough in open pore woods but it works well for tenons, etc.

Re: Other blasphemy

wilbur

>I didn't even think of chopsticks, but then again, I'm Chinese, so in our house we're busy using the chopsticks for other purposes. :@)

Next time I'm at the local Chinese grocery store, I might just pick up some drawbore pins. :@)

Re: Other blasphemy

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>I think chopsticks are a great idea. I've been trying to make bamboo nails from raw with little success (maybe I expect too much); but chopsticks could be a very good substitute. Thanks.

Pam

Re: Other blasphemy

ThomD

>Most of the material in a chopstick is pretty soft pith. Can't argue with what works, just wonder what part, the soft or the hard is the reason it works.

Re: Other blasphemy

wilbur

>Having been (deservedly) whacked by chopsticks by my folks on occasion when I was growing up, I can say that the chopstick definitely is not soft. :@)