I now know why I stopped using dowels

[woodchucker]

It's been a long time since I doweled something to put boards together. My son wants a nightstand made out of hockey sticks. It's too late to edge glue them together. So I thought I'll use dowels. Much slower than a biscuit joiner, and while fitting them together they get so tight.

I was dead on with alignment, but after doing just two sticks, I'll be going to a plate joiner. We'll see how that goes.

He wants this

but I'll be doing it with better construction technique, but not better sticks. Lot's of old worn sticks.

[hubops]

I can't speak about the dowel issue - but be sure to clean-up all the glue-joint-surfaces - for wax and tape residue .. I always treated my new stick handles with a good rubbing of fine steel wool - then rubbed in wax. This was mainly to save the palms of the hockey gloves - from the wear & tear - of the rough paint & fiberglass finish. Young players seem to do a lot of fancy tape-jobs - that likely leaves residue .. John T.

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[Leon]

That is an inherent problems with dowels but this company has solved the friction along the whole length of the dowel.. They have significantly shortened the friction distance with out shortening the dowel.

Probably no help now but maybe in the future.

[dadiOH]

Sure might help me. In the near future.

I've used a fair number of trunnels ("tree nails") over the years, just whittled them myself, but this is sure easier, not to mention more precise.

Their site mentions them being available in around a dozen species - including mahogany which would be my need - but only offers four domestic spacies for sale. I'll have to check further.

Thanks, Leon.

[woodchucker]

Yep, I wound up planing the edges down by hand, so I can now use the plate joiner. Was not looking to do that originally. Now I have a good clean joint. I am certainly worrid about the longevity of this since it will shrink and expand.. But this is a 22 year olds idea of a night stand, when he finds a woman and settles down, this will go into the basement with his other hockey gear.

I used to play too... His speed skating though has made him extremely fast. He's a defensive player....

[Puckdropper]

woodchucker wrote in news: [e-mail]:

It'd be interesting to see how hockey sticks in that application move over time. They usually start straight and stay that way. I left a couple old ones outside for a while and they haven't moved.

Did you use all wood, or have a mix of wood and composite? Many composite sticks are hollow all the way down, so you've got maybe 3/16-

1/8" of material to hold a fastener. I wonder how that would work with biscuits. (You might have to use "Lew Glue" aka epoxy to hold things together.)

Puckdropper

[Lew Hodgett]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- I wouldn't have used either dowels or biscuits, rather would have epoxied pairs of sticks together.

IOW, if you start with 32 sticks, 1st pass yields 16 sets of 2 sticks.

2nd pass yields 8 sets of 4 sticks. 3rd pass yields 4 sets of 8 sticks. 4th pass yields 2 sets of 16 sticks.

Final pass yields 1 set of 32 sticks or finished top.

Dowels can be dry fit for positioning only, no epoxy needed or wanted.

As for surface prep, a 4" right angle sander with 24 grit discs does a great job of surface prep of epoxied surfaces.

Lew

[Morgans]

It's been a long time since I doweled something to put boards together. My son wants a nightstand made out of hockey sticks. It's too late to edge glue them together. So I thought I'll use dowels. Much slower than a biscuit joiner, and while fitting them together they get so tight.

Seems to me like you could stack all but the outer edge of a panel of them and use a long drill bit and drill the whole stack and use a long dowel for all of them, then add the outer stick. Alternatively, rip off a veneer of the stick and apply them to a piece of birch plywood.

[Nick]

This looks a nice job. Can't comment on dowelled construction, it's always worked well for me. If I were undertaking such a task I would ensure that some working ends of the sticks were included as features. Feet/drawer handles/decoration etc. But I'm not, so I won't. To be brutally honest. Unless you knew that Bauer et al made hockey sticks (and I don't know that) what would an uninformed viewer make of this piece? This is not derogatory in any way. Just my thoughts. All the best, Nick.

[Greg Guarino]

My current project has 224 dowels, and of course, 448 holes. I built a series of jigs and setups that made it go pretty quickly, although certainly not as quickly as biscuits. This one would probably have worked for hockey sticks:

[Greg Guarino]

I was thinking the same thing. Might there be some way to work the business end of a stick into the design somewhere?