So I got this email with a link to go to Woodpeckers. I was surprised that the link did not go to Lee Valley.
Then I snapped and realized it is not April Fools Day.
Who will buy this? LOL
Hey, why not? It's only $399.99.
So far it looks like 1 commenter is sold (the other one, not so much ;)
You know, the only part of the link necessary is:
You can leave off all the query parameters (the elements after the first '?' in the URI), which generally encode personal information about you.
As for who, looks quite useful, if overpriced. Consider the same folks that would buy a Stanley #77, which are currently as expensive and much more rare.
Where, after all, would one find a Bocate or Dalbergia Nigra dowel commercially?
This is less expensive:
LOL Yeah! Why not. I could maybe see it if it made normal length dowels but 5~6" probably not.
Yes, but I did not want to test the link or look for the ?
Some one is going to buy it, true. ;~)
Very similar...this to make chop sticks but much less expensive.
LOL, Yeah. I have a feeling that this will go up on some ones display of one time tools, from Woodpeckers, and it will never be used.
Precisely and what I was thinking when I saw the Woodpecker version. and no limit to length.
Boudreaux, he say say: "Fifty bucks is fifty bucks", him ...
Great product idea ! .. now I no longer need to hand-carve all my dowels with my Lee Valley kitchen knife .. :-)
John T.
If you need to make custom dowels, you need something to shape them for you; you're not going to whittle them. $400 is ridiculous, but Lie-Nielsen has a good dowel plate for $55:
Tom
Tom, Thanks for the link...looks like some of the owners/users over SMC have struggled a bit with that plate...I have not read all the comments yet...
I can't see them selling a lot of them, but if I were a custom furniture maker who made a lot of pieces every year and wanted to use matching dowels or exotic hardwood dowels for "show," that thing would be well worth the money.
Leon, how many Domino mortises did you say you've cut? You bought an extremely expensive machine to do it and didn't think twice because quality and speed, right?
Now, if it was guranteed to work ... and for a long time with iron wood I'd be all over it.
Leon wrote in news:3YWdnd-eGsrCb2HKnZ2dnUU7- snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
Looks like a solution in need of a problem.
In just the 5mm size I just opened my 15th bag of 300 or 4,500 Domino's and almost 8,000 mortises just for that size.
I did think twice, actually for several weeks and probably once each day minimum and to this day the quality of the mortises have not deteriorated. And the original 5mm bit just cut 144 perfect and exposed mortises yesterday.
IIRC I paid about $800 for the Domino and that comes to 10 cents per mortise in just the 5mm size. The dowel maker appears to have 8 threads per inch and capacity looks to be 5~6". Assuming the larger, you will need to crank the handle 48 times to produce "1", 6" dowel and another 48 times to get ready for the next dowel. So you are going to crank almost 100 times for each dowel if making more than 1 dowel. To get your cost down to the equivalent 10 cents per mortise/dowel you will need to produce 4,000 dowels and or about 400,000 cranks. I plunge my Domino mortiser 1/100 as many times for the same result. And my plunges take about 2-3 seconds regardless of size.
So yes my Domino was very expensive but this thing is beyond expensive if comparing as pointed out above.
BUT if you just have to have a dozen or so ebony dowels that are 6" long I believe that a production shop would already have a lathe and that would be an easy way to produce short dowels or longer dowels.
I think this dowel maker would be a great addition to a collection of "one time" tools and a great conversation piece.
I do not think I would use it even if it pushed out Domino tenons. ;~)
I think it may work as a nut cracker too! ;~)
Yep, always been pretty much Woodpecker's business model,IMO; but I admit to having purchased a number of their offerings ... some of their sizzle has more steak than than others.
It looks to me like you could just buy the dies, build a jig to hold them on a pipe clamp, and for a lot less than $399 be able to cut dowels six feet long.
For certain values.
Note the ship date.
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