Draw-bore guide + draw-bore maker

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ColeyS1

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Morning all,

After reading Petes post about draw-boring, i thought i post a few pics to try and make it a little clearer -also a jig for making the tapered fellas.

As an apprentice this took a bit of figuring out. :-k

First thing you want to do is drill your hole for your draw-bore in the wood with the mortice first -

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When im drilling newel posts i try to keep this as upright as possible so the draw-bore has the same margin in,from each side. When i was an apprentice i use to drill the tenon first which made it a real ball ache to get the newels all looking the same.

Once you have hole drilled in the bit with the mortice, insert your tenon. Put the drill in reverse, and with the auger bit allow to spin a few times.
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You should end up with a point being made in the tenon. Then simply move the point of the auger bit, a little closer to the shoulder

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voila !

When you've driven the wooden draw-bore through, cut off the bit with the pointy end, a little proud. If it needs wedging a little to fill the hole it sometimes moves the pin back below the surface.

This is probably blindingly obvious to most people, but hopefully it might benefit someone :wink:

I've got these metal pins made up for dry fitting, prior to hammering home the wooden ones.

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The joy of these, is you can gently smash the toffee out of them, without fear of breaking them.

After figuring out how to draw-bore, i was always given the lovely job of hand planing 3/8th and 1/2inch pins for stairs. Using a block plane made this job much more bearable, but i still on occasion ended up planing off pieces of skin/finger nails trying to hold the damn things. :evil:

For a drawbore to work well, they had to be tapered - so using a parallel dowel was out of the question.

The challenge was to conjure up something. After moaning several times to the foreman about always having to make the pins, he told me there was no other way- This made me even more determined (hammer)

This is the mk2 version. The first was hand powered and didn't have the bearing arrangement.

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The bearing on the left is mounted slightly further down (1mm ish). This makes it a tapered jobby.


To make a braw-bore, you need a square section of wood- this needs to fit snug in the bearing.

Insert split pin

Turn on drill- works best fairly slow
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With the router permantly in the plunged position slowly lower it. (working from right to left gives the best finish. I also found using a bigger cutter worked alot better.- think i usually use a 18mm one

Move the router from right to left and you're done

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The hardest thing about this, is setting the depth of the router. Once you've got that sorted you can make both 3/8th and 1/2 easy peasy- Roughly one every 70-80 seconds i think.

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The big square ends are ideal for whacking with a hammer- especially the flimsy 3/8th ones

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Its still a manic job making them, just much quicker and less painful.

HTH

Simon
 
Hi Simon, brilliant jig for taper pegs but there is no need for taper pegs in dry wood. On stairs I use a lip and spur or sharp spade bit 12 or 1/2" to so it leaves's a nice clean chip free surface as well as clean hole. The method is much the same as your example, drill post first at least 3" depth then place tenon in turn drill by hand to mark remove tenon measure 2-3mm back toward shoulder and drill hole. Take 12mm/1/2",what ever is available at time, chamfer/sharpen end a bit. Measure the depth drill mark on dowel and hammer home. Flush cutting dowel when done or round over ends to make feature pegs.

Edited to say i really like that peg jig, the extra left over for square blank looks great for bashing. Definitely going to make me one of those. :D
 
It is brilliant.

I've got a question tho: do you use the end of the router bit, or the side?

If you used the side (assuming it'll work like that), you'd only have to offset the bearings to the side instead then the router depth wouldn't matter. You could shim (or have a fine-adjust movable fence) for the different diameters.

I just thought it might save a bit of time in set-up.
 
My son does them with a drawknife and spokeshave - results aren't quite as classy as your pics, but they work
 
Thanks for all your comments people :wink:

Erik the viking, it uses the end. Not sure what it would be like working from the side, but guess it should work. The adjustment on the router's all built in, where as if the jig needed to be adjustable i think it would make more work.

Be very interesting to see what others come up with. You can see on one end i've tried to fit a motor directly onto the bearing. It had no where near enough torque, hence using the good ol bosch drill :)

Theres a mk3 version floating around in my head, but im a little unsure how to put it into practice. Instead of having it so the wood had to slide through the square section glued in the bearing, i was thinking of using an acrol midi chuck on the left side. If the woods a little slack in the square section, drawboring doesn't happen. It bounces and flaps all over the place. :evil: That chuck is the only one i can find (4 jaw self centering) that would be small enough for doing the job. Unless a collet extension is used, you're limited by your plunge depth and length of 18mm cutter.

Does that sound like im just waffling or does it kind of make sense :duno:

Looking forward to see what you chaps come up with :wink:

Cheers

Simon
 
Very informative, I had forgotten about the steel pins we used. Our draw dowels were made using a draw knife, routers had not been invented (trams were pulled by horses) :lol:
 
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