Gluing dowels

Keep in mind also the more precise you build the less you have to work about keeping the work square. Square cut joints will naturally square the assembly as you apply the clamp pressure.

The head board pics that I posted a few days ago were only squared up by applying clamp pressure to the 4 rails where they met the 2 stiles. Basically if the joint is closed the angle is as it was cut to be.

ly with a jig and wedges:

d was the tiniest bit out;

I've ocassionally used wedges for similar clamping. Driving one wedge in, from one direction, only, sometimes causes the clamped piece to move, along with the wedge, as the wedge is being driven snug. If this is the sort of misaligning you're speaking of, with the third assembly, then it would be best to use two wedges, at each point, and snug them from different directi ons, so that the clamped piece doesn't move out of alignment. This double wedging approach is used in other circumstances, also, somewhat like shimmi ng door jams (from both sides of the doorway).

Sonny

I figure I have only ten dowels to reshape, so I do plan to do it, even if I don't find an efficient method.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my tools and skills have resulted - at least in previous projects - in a bit of inaccuracy. I have been gratified to find that these "ladders" have gone together square "naturally", as you suggest they would if cut properly. The worst one so far needed to be tweaked perhaps a thirty-second. Still, it was nice to be able to see and check those good results quickly by lining the work up with the jig.

I made almost all of the cuts for this project with a miter saw, but this time I took some pains to set it up correctly, using a couple of drafting triangles, a 1-2-3 block and a wixie box. It seems to have worked.

My second "wedge" was fixed, but I set them up such that driving the movable wedge in could only tend to move the work *into* the squaring jig, not away.

What I meant was that when I put the first two units into the squaring jig, they lined up perfectly right off. The third had one "leg" away from the end of the jig by a very small amount, maybe a thirty-second. A very slight amount of pressure got it perfect.

I guess it would behoove me to learn something about glues. The first thing I wonder is about squeeze-out. I know (sort-of) how to deal with it with Titebond, but epoxy, nexabond, polyurethane?

No need to get fancy. Sometimes all you need is to squeeze them slightly with a pair of pliers. With the right pliers you can even get a groove of sorts for the glue to escape.

Practice makes perfect!

FWIW your doing well, IMHO.

Can't hurt at all. ;)

That said, It's not usually the swelling of the dowels that is the problem - and it's biscuits that are purposely designed to swell, not necessarily dowels.

AAMOF, with the initial coating (and providing the piston effect is mitigated) you may notice a slight lubrication effect at first ... until the glue starts to set.

Also, you may also have this same sticky problem, from exceeding the open time slightly, when gluing mortise and tenon joints that are sloppy enough that the piston effect is not an issue.

IOW, and with most hardwood dowels, I question, from experience, that it is water based glue at the root of the problem.

Non water based glues, like Nexabond are great for smaller and/or special applications, but for gluing most furniture and cabinet projects, prepare to dent the hell out of your budget, and possibly still not solve the issue if you exceed the open time.

Firstly, thanks for the tip about flattening one side of the dowels. That made things much easier. And I thought of a very simple way to do it efficiently:

The "jig" probably took all of a minute to make. As an added bonus, my fingers are just as long as before I started. :)

RE: Subject

Got a vice?

Got a 10" Flat Bastard File?

The rest is an exercise in flattening.

Lew

I wanted a way to avoid all of the clamping and unclamping, and found one.

-------------------------------------------

"Greg Guar> I wanted a way to avoid all of the clamping and unclamping, and > found one.

------------------------------------------------------- So did I.

Lew

In the time before time, before biscuits and Dominoes there reigned the dow el.

We made our own dowels many a time as they could be hard to get. Without a thickness planer, it was too hard to make great fitting splines quickly, b ut you could take your calipers and find rod stock that would work somewher e and buy a couple of sticks that would last a long time. If the stock was too large, we simply put a piece in a drill chuck and "reduced it" with a piece of 80gr. You would be surprised how well that worked.

For striations, I came up with my own method. I drilled several holes in a straight line from edge to edge (not lengthwise) and cut the board in two down the middle of the holes. I put the dowels I had cut to length into my holding jigs and just used masking tape to hold them into the concave cut o uts in the board. I could easily get two lengthwise air/glue relief cuts o n each dowel by just touching it to a band saw blade, since I only needed a bout 1/32" deep.

Using a piece of 1x4 scrap, I could about 5 dowels per board half, and the dowels were cut to length and ready to go when I pulled the tape off. This really just took >>a few minutes

Good Idea but you probably only need to make 2 passes at the most. You are only providing a passage for air and glue to escape.