Doweling jig number two

This is a follow-up to the blog entry on doweling jig number one.

Today is Tuesday.  The Girl was too ill to go in to work with The Lady, and it was my turn to stay home with sick children.

But because The Girl was sick enough to stay home, but not so sick that she needed constant monitoring, I was able to make some more progress on the second doweling jig.
 

Because this dowel plate is a completely different shape than the previous dowel plate, the jig or holder is also of a different design.

The previous dowel plate was from angle iron; this one is from a slab of steel about as thick as my thumb.  So, I decided to make a trough with legs.


In the above photo, I've already laid the metal bar on the piece of wood, traced the outline, and rough-chiseled the depth.  So now I'm using a router plane to bring the depth to a uniform thickness.

Here's a shot of the metal bar that is the doweling plate.  Note the weird bend at the end:  dunno why that's there, but it was already there when I got the metal.  (Note:  "Thank you" to Next-Door Uncle, who gave me the scrap piece of metal with the holes at each end, plus drilled an additional hole (different size!) in the middle.)

Here's the bar, in the nest.

A pretty nice fit -- if I do say so myself!  No discernible side-to-side or end-to-end movement.  In fact, it's a little difficult to get the metal bar out of the trough:  even when I turn the wood upside-down it doesn't come out:  I need to whack it.

Here's the underside of the holder.  As you can see, there's some funny angles going on.  That's because, as with most of my projects, I'm using scraps from a previous project.  All three pieces are leftovers from a free-standing chinup bar that I made.  These pieces are scraps from the diagonal braces of the frame for the chinup bar -- hence, the funny angles.

Note the holes:  I decided that since I now have a doweling jig (the one I completed a few days ago!), it would be fun to have some doweled joints.

I also had fun with some bastardized joinery.  The joint on the left is some sort of half-lap; the joint on the right is possibly an "open mortice"(???).

Here's the holder, dummied up.  The homemade dowels are in the trough.

The dowels, BTW, are also from scraps from the chinup bar!

And -- here's the holder, nearly completed.  The legs have been glued and doweled.

I made a short dowel as a plug, then put it into the hole in the bent end, as a "Do not use this hole" kind of indicator.  This plug is also a scrap from the chinup bar.

Notice that I made a little piece of wood to hold the metal bar into the trough, so that it doesn't "jump" while I'm pounding it.  The bar is currently swung out of the way, and the bar is not yet seated in the trough.

The only thing standing in the way of completion is a visit to Next-Door Uncle's:  I realized that I can't figure out the precise diameter of the holes (it would help if I knew whether it was in inches or millimeters).  So I need to visit Next-Door Uncle and track down the drill bits he used.  And then I need to drill some clearance holes in the trough, under the holes, to allow the completed dowels to pass thorough.


I'll probably post a "finished" photo as an update, at the bottom of this blog entry.


--GG