Japanese Style Pencil Case Build Process
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Posted 27th October 2024
To affix the cross-pieces with wenge dowels I obviously need some wenge dowels. To make these, I started by splitting one of the slices of wenge along the grain by tapping a chisel into the top and then pushing a bit harder:
That gave me a little pile of wenge bits:
My first attempt to dowel-ify them was to run them over an inverted plane (held in the vice) until they were somewhere near octagonal with a slight taper and then to whack them through my dowel plate, working down 0.5 mm at a time:
That really didn't work. I think they were just too big to start with and the repeated bashing through the dowel plate was too much for them. I only tried a couple but they came out really wonky and one broke well before getting down to 4 mm.
At this point I decided it was time to give up any pretence of this being a "mostly hand tool" project and get the home-made lathe out. I was already thinking I'd probably drill the dowel holes on the pillar drill (for accuracy reasons) so I might as well embrace the power!
I mounted the split pieces in the lathe chuck with about 25 mm protruding and used a skew chisel to make them round and then reduce the diameter to a bit over 4 mm.
In each case I tried (and mostly succeeded) to get the end nearest the chuck down to a fraction under 4 mm (3.8 to 3.9 mm) and most of the length between 4 and 5 mm. After sawing off the would-be dowels I could then pass them through the 4.5 mm and 4 mm holes of the dowel plate:
After a little bit of "rinse and repeat" I had 10 dowels. I only need 8, but I figured it was best to make a couple of spares so that I can choose the best ones when fitting them.
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