With the router table back online, I was quickly able to turn some walnut stock into six 3′ 1-1/4″ dowels, roughly. Meaning, I aimed for a little wide of dead on 1-1/4 to give me some room to sneak up on a good fit at the lathe. The quality of the dowel/chair part joint determines how easy the chair goes together and how stable it is prior to diving in the wedges.
Probably no one cares about this other than me, but I want a nice fit. My oak chairs are rather too tight and I sometimes need to ‘convince’ them to go together with a mallet. However, once together, I can sit in them, for hours, without wedges. I didn’t want to burden Cormac with needing a mallet, I want them to go together easy, but not sloppy. That might stress the pin/wedge joint something that’s damn hard to repair.
I am able to get 3 pins out of each dowel. The finished size is about 7″ long. The 3/4″ part is 2-1/2″ and the 1-1/4″ part needs to be at least 6″ long and a couple need to be closer to 6-1/2″ long. Knowing my nascent lathe skills as I do, I give myself plenty of room to fix fails. The skew chisel, the tool best suited for this operation, is probably the hardest to master. Without great care, it will hop out of the cut and skip down you piece making an ugly divot. With practice and the confidence to go with it, I’d easily be able to get 4 pins out of each dowel. But I have plenty of walnut and less practice, so we’ll be conservative.
As it happens, the turning went pretty well. Walnut is more forgiving than oak (shocker). But, I still haven’t wrapped my head around the frequency of sharpening lathe tools require. With chisels and plane blades, going to the grinder means you screwed up or you need to change the bevel angle. With HSS lathe tools, you are going to the grinder many times in a session. A halfway decent bench chisel is a lifetime investment for a hobbyist, but a parting tool is a wear item. Weird.
After the lathe, I cut the pins apart and went to finishing them. If I were skilled at the lathe, they would be pretty much done. But I’m not, so they aren’t. They need a little cleaning up with sandpaper or a scraper. The problem is holding them. They are short, and round. And, while that describes some people I know, that’s an awkward shape to work on at the bench. I have my small bench that can bring them up to a good height, but I’m forced to grip the pins in the vise jaws and this looks like a good way to make oval pins.
Then my eyes fall upon the ugly stepchild of the modern shop: The hand screw clamp. In the old pre-industrial hand tool shop days, these were common and indispensable clamps. These days with all the work holding gadgets we have, no one uses them anymore. I have 6 or 7 that I picked up back in the day before I had much gear. They are fairly cheap and they are handy when it comes to clamping something oddly shaped. Since they were cheap, their resale value is low enough that I would rather hang onto them against that occasional need.
A little layout and 5 min with a saw and I have a solved problem. One I may never need again, but now I have a clamp for small diameter Round Things. Behold:
I have only the right jaw clamped in my face vise. This allows me to open and close the screw clamp without touching the face vise (hard to see here, but there is gasket material glued to the side of the bench as well as the chop of the vise so the hand screw’s left jaw has enough clearance to move when the right jaw is firmly held).
Now I can conveniently cleanup the pins and test fit them easily. This is where being precious with the turning bites me in the ass. The pins are 1/32 to 1/16 oversize. too small a difference to put back on the lathe if that were even an option, but enough that it’s going to be a lot more work than the few licks with the sandpaper that I had planned on.
After much experimenting, the best method to both clean them up and thin them down is a scraper. I have several, one has a granulated series of concave semi-circles. Then a light touch up with fine sandpaper to clean up the scraper marks. It’s not amazingly fast, so it takes 2 evenings to go through all of them so they fit properly and look nice.
Not content with standing pat on that effort, I decide to try to harden the pins. I’ll tell that tale elsewhere, suffice it to say, that was a Bad Idea ™.
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