The Bespoke Woodworker

I decided to make my own try square, in the spirit of the hand tool extravaganza I’ve been into lately.  I saw an article by Adam Cherubini on making them, I _think_ in popular woodworking.  (If somebody has a link to the issue, let me know!)  I don’t have the article handy, but the basis of it was pretty simple.

I grabbed some spare Sipo and some spare Maple that already happened to be an appropriate width, a hair over 1/4″ and 3/4″ respectively.

Crosscut and hit them with a smoothing plane.

A nice full width mortise courtesy of a tenoning jig.  (I’m sure Adam would not approve!)  Then get it as close to square as my starret will show me, and some glue and clamps.

After resting overnight, I declamped, and smoothed it, and rechecked for square.

Came out as close as I could get it judging by visible light between it and the reference square.

To ensure no movement, and because it just looks cool, I decided to toss in some pegs out of scrap Padouk.  I made a dowel plate (see previous blog post) and whipped out a dowel.

I drilled out some holes.

Then finally pegged and smoothed.

Finished with a thin coat of BLO just to keep the glue off.

Fin!

During my try square project (as of yet unpublished) I ran into a situation where I wanted some nice hardwood dowels in fairly short lengths. I didn’t want to order up stock, and the dowels I have on hand are rather bland, various borg softwoods and oak.

I had previously seen the L-N Dowel plate, but at $50, it seemed an extravagance. $100 if you want the metric version, as well. It seems like such a simple tool. A steel plate with some holes. As I’m in a toomaking frenzy, I decided, once again, to dive in and try it myself.  I had some 1.5″x.25″ flat plate stock, so I got myself a 6″ piece and went to work with the milling machine.   You could just as easily do this in a drill press.  I elected 7 holes, to correspond with the wood bits I use most, a quality 7 piece Colt 5 Star brad point set.  It includes: 1/8″, 3/16″, 1/4″, 5/16″, 3/8″, 7/16″, & 1/2″ sizes.

It ended up being relatively trivial.  I used some Ti coated twist drill bits.  I still lack a 7/16, which is why you see a gap in plate.  I saved room for it.

I merely cut some stock to size, whittle off the corners, and pound it through.    If I have any trouble, I run a small burr up the edges with a burnisher.

Works perfectly!

I may whip out a metric version too.