Hi all, I am looking for a reliable dowel maker for making dowels between 12 mm and 16mm or 1/2“ - 5/8“ for my next project where I'm going to be draw boarding a ton. Anyone not using theirs and are willing to sell or are happy to lend for a fee, please get in touch.
Veritas prefer, but not essential as long as it chucks out repeatable results.
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Thanks.
Are you sure you need to draw bore? It's useful in very particular situations but gets a bit overused nowadays!
Most common (only?) architectural joinery use is for stair string to newel post.
It isn't innately stronger but helps to pull together things difficult to clamp.
Very often they were just riven roughly square, pointed and hammered in, getting squashed into a round shape in the process so you can't always tell they started square.
Drilling a round hole is easy, making a round peg is less so.
Riving is good because it follows the grain and makes them tougher.
There's a neat axe technique for small riven items without risking your fingers - you hold the workpiece with a bit of offcut carefully placed to guide the axe. I'll see if I can find the photos!
PS found them. You can cut and shape an end grain piece quite nicely with a joiner's axe:
Your pin needs to be at least twice as long as needed - so the tapered bit goes right through and the parallel sided bit stays in the hole.
Another trad dowel device is the dowel plate whereby you hammer your riven piece through a hole in a steel plate to shape it. Probably a lot quicker than "cutting" them with a gadget.
Another trad draw-bore device is the "draw bore pin" which pulls the pieces together before you hammer in the actual dowel/peg thing
