This Amazon Dowel Maker compelled me to create my own Product.
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- čas přidán 14. 05. 2024
- Part One. I bought a brilliantly designed dowel maker from Amazon. Why did it fail? The dowels it creates are less than satisfactory. In this video I test the dowel maker and try to analyze why it failed. Coming up in part 2, my journey to create a better dowel maker.
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Digital Plans to make your own!
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00:00. Inexpensive dowel maker
01:58. Why do you need an accurate dowel?
06:14. Testing the dowel maker
07:59. Why did it fail?
09:53. Coming up in Part 2
The blade is at a scraping position of the red and black jig. It should be positioned at a shearing position for it to work better, it would shear the fibers off instead of “chopping” off the fibers.
A suggestion that may improve the quality of the dowel. Instead of taking the blank square stock directly to the size dowel needed, I am wondering if the stock where first "dowelled" through a larger size aperture and then incrementally step that dowel down through successively smaller sizes to the desired final size if the quality would not be improved? If you find it in you it would be interesting to see what you arrive at.
Hello! I bought the same one. Had the same problem till I ran the drill the other way. Try running the drill in reverse. It works! Good Luck!
Haha thats so wild! I had half an idea to try reversing but never ended up doing it. I just tried with softwood - there's still tear-out but it was definitely a gentler cut. A little more accurate to its dimension too. I tried with poplar right afterwards but couldn't get it to cut in reverse. Then I tried forward and got a semi-decent cut, probably because the reverse action of the previous dowel sharpened the blade a little. Moral of the story - always try everything!
I can't tell from the close up views, but it seems the angle of the blade seems wrong. I would think you would want to mimic the blade angle of whittling. When you first showed it, I imagined the dowel maker was going to be powered by a electric drill, such as 1/4" bit drive. I imagined some sort of simple gears that would change the x rotation torque into a z-axis rotation. The simple machine would grip, pull, and rotate the wood while the blade would be cutting mostly down it's length towards the leading edge, also pulling the wood in. I could also imagine another way to do this like an old school pencil sharpener, but without the angled worm blades.
Interested to see what you have built.
Got one and had the same result and comparing it to the larger dowel maker I have it's clear the main problem is the angle of attack of the blade. The more sophisticated dowel makers have the blade set to take a shearing cut as the wood rotates into the blade, slicing away the long grain fibres. In this design the blade is set at 90 degrees to the surface of the wood so as it rotates into it this just rips out the fibres and gives the predictable ragged finish. If the blade were set at an angle in the central element that might help. It also might help if the blade was tapered in its length so the amount of material taken off at the start was less and it only cut down to the required diameter as it reaches the exit side of the jig.
Same experience as yours with this jig. Very disappointing. It's a little better if you first bring your initial part closer to a cylinder. If you found a way to improve it I'm interested.
Could you be pushing it through too fast? If you push a metal lathe/mill too fast, it will create chatter with softer materials (you just break equipment with harder materials). I can't help but wonder if the final product would be much smoother if you pushed it through at a much slower rate and maybe had a faster drill. Wood is different, but I think the physics are similar in this regard.
Ive tried all kinds of things with it, slow feeds, fast feeds, slow drill, fast drill, sneaking up on sizes etc. There's always some kind of deep tear out in the wood fibres. It would be interesting to back trace through all the re-sellers to the original designers and see what results they got with it.
I need one that can do 2" to 2.5"
You are taking off too much material in one pass.
Others have correctly mentioned cutting angle for the blade - a shearing cut gets you a smooth surface. However it also needs a lot more RPM. I regularly turn 5-6mm lace bobbins at 4000 RPM. There’s not a drill on the planet that will get anywhere near that speed. The key here is surface speed (feet per second). The smaller the diameter the faster it needs to spin to get past tearing out and into shearing.
Thats really interesting, you'd have to have something pretty powerful to reach those RPMs I assume!
@@acanadianwoodworkersorry if I wasn’t clear. My lathe is geared to run at 4000 RPM
@@acanadianwoodworkeryour router-based jig solves the speed problem because that blade runs at over 10 grand, thus the smoother result
"This doesn't work, but I will make something that does, and you can buy it from me 😃"
I an currently getting into building my own arrows for archery and upon doing research I came upon this video. I am searching for the best "dowel maker" for the money.( Buget is pretty tight.) While i can't justify $450-$10000, i would definitely break my own arm reaching for my wallet to drop $100 or so on this. I will be keeping my eye out for this even of i have to put a slight pause on my endeavors. I pray this does in fact hit the market soon.
If only there was something that specialized in making round things of all sorts.
I'm from an alternate universe where the lathe was never invented :)
As to the question of how much I would pay, with a little fine tuning I would gladly pay between $100-$125