Making Dowels

I've been practicing my hand tool skills over the past week. For a fun project, I decided to build a couple of 'marshmallow crossbows' that Steve Ramsey featured on his YouTube channel. I have a lot of wood left over from various projects, so I decided to make two complementary crossbows - one for me and one for my daughter. Instead of shooting marshmallows around the house, I'm going to use small foam plugs cut from dense pipe insulation. The crossbows look to be the perfect size for Nerf darts, so I might pick up a pack of those as well to see how they work. Since this is a project that I'm doing for fun, I thought it would be a good opportunity to work on my hand tool skills. I did use the band saw and the combination belt/disc sander a bit, but most of the cutting and shaping has been done with a coping saw and chisels. For this post, I wanted to document my effort to make dowels.

The plans call for a 5/16 inch dowel set inside a 3/8 inch hole; the dowel acts as the firing pin. After looking through my scrap wood, I realized I only had 1/2 inch and 3/4 inch dowels. These were both too big. Rather than make a trip to the store to buy a new dowel and then only use 4 inches of it, I decided to take the 1/2 inch dowel and trim it down to 5/16 inch.

I began by locking the dowel into my small portable workbench, then marking a line 2 inches from the end. I use a 10 inch back saw to cut a thin kerf around the dowel. As I pared down the dowel, the kerf allowed the trimming to break free, clearing them out of the way and reducing tear out.

With kerf cut, I began paring down the dowel with a 1/2 inch chisel. I worked my way around the circumference as I cut, making small cuts each time so that the dowel remained more or less round. A freshly sharpened chisel and my home-made maple mallet made short work of the oak dowel.

Every few cuts I checked my progress with a 5/16 inch wrench. Since this is a fun project I don't mind sacrificing a bit of accuracy, hence why I used the wrench rather than calipers. The dowel needs to be able to move freely within the handle, so I'm not looking for perfection. Using the wrench to gauge my progress worked well, and by the end I had a 5/16 inch dowel. Turning the wrench along the shaft of the dowel also helped smooth out the cuts.

A little sanding at the end left me with a nice, smooth, nearly perfect dowel. One down, one more to go.

After completing the dowel, I used the back saw to cut it off. I then smoothed over the end grain with a bit of sandpaper. Overall things went better than I had anticipated. The more I use my hand tools, the more confident I feel using them. I think my hesitation stems from poor attempts in my youth when I tried to use hand tools without understanding how they work. That, and I never made the effort to sharped or otherwise prepare any tools for use. Dull tools make for unnecessarily difficult work. A properly sharpened and prepared tool makes woodworking enjoyable. Using hand tools has another advantage: without the need for hearing protection I can actually hear the radio! That's especially nice when the local classical station is playing a Brahms concerto.

I'll share the completed crossbows in the next post.