So I followed Gye’s advice and followed Kari’s advice and whipped out my block plane to fashion me some pegs for drawboring the tenons on my stretchers. I originally was considering making a dowel plate, but Kari in her post suggests that this works best for short dowels. All of mine are at least 6″ long.
So anyway, the block plane was a bit slow at first, on the corners, but it quickly picked up. I just started at one end until it fit in my test hole and wherever it hung up, I kept at it from that point. It took about 20 minutes to do that one dowel, which will serve to make 3 or 4 pegs. After this picture was taken I “doweled” the other piece, and I figure I’ll do two more of this length to be safe.
When it was all said and done, I was surrounded by thin ribbons of wood, and was happy I didn’t have a lathe. This was fun.
Adventures in Woodworking 
7 comments
Comments feed for this article
November 3, 2010 at 12:59 am
The Village Carpenter
I’ll second that—it is fun to make dowels with a plane. The other benefit to making them this way is that the corners on the tiny facets dig into the round holes as they’re driven in. So they are grabbier than a perfectly round dowel. I recently made some rather long dowels with my dowel plate–around 4″. If you take it slowly and tap lightly, the wood won’t split. I was using cherry, though, so I’m not so sure that a brittle wood like purpleheart would hold up.
November 3, 2010 at 11:07 am
Eric
Yes, I can vouch for the “grabbiness” of these dowels. I basically worked it until I could run the dowel all the way through my test hole, although it took a little twisting and pulling in places. That’s a good thing.
Thanks (a few years late) for a great post! Yippee for a nice search feature on your blog. 🙂
November 3, 2010 at 8:28 am
Gye Greene
Neat-o!
Yeah, hadn’t considered the length issue. Makes sense — they’d probably get a bit of a curve to them, the longer they are.
That said: although I haven’t tried it myself, I can see you enjoying some sort of pole or treadle lathe.
–GG
November 3, 2010 at 9:51 am
Eric
Yeah, I could see a pole lathe in my future. No plans, but it sounds like something I would consider if I had the space (although I think I saw a plan once that incorporated the workbench).
November 3, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Seamus
Well done
I imagine, based on the treenails
I’ve pulled from old barn beams
they went about it the same way
more or less
November 4, 2010 at 10:46 am
Dan (from the love of wood)
Thanks for sharing Eric. Looks like a very handy technique. And as the others have said you don’t need it perfectly round and probably better if it’s a little uneven to hold in the hole. Recently I used the dowel plate technique with some good success http://theloveofwood.blogspot.com/2010/07/square-peg-in-round-hole-aka-making.html. Combining the two techniques could be another good way.
November 6, 2010 at 1:19 pm
Eric
Excellent! Thanks for sharing that link, Dan. For my bench, I can put up with the unevenness of the handplane method. But if I was doing something that required a better show quality, I will certainly use the dowel plate technique!