#1
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Tool for reducing diameter of dowels
Some time ago I saw a post describing a steel tool that had a bunch of holes in it. This tool could be used to gradually reduce dowel diameter by pulling the dowel through successively smaller holes, each time shaving off a bit of the wood. This came up in connection with the dowels used to construct the escape towers of the Mercury Redstone, Little Joe II and Saturn 1-B. The post included a link to a company who sold this thing for about 25 bucks. Does any of this ring a bell? Can anyone help me out here?
Joe |
#2
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Quote:
I believe McMaster-Carr sells this.
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#3
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They are generally called draw plates, I got mine from Micro-Mark. To be honest it was one of the more useless expenditures of $25 I ever made. I mean it works sort of, but you can buy the packages of wood dowels (and other shapes, and plastic too) at the hobby store that come in all sorts of sizes. I think I used it once and that was it.
I’ll sell you mine if you really, really want one. Quote:
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#4
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Seems like wood would get very VERY weak VERY rapidly being drawn down to very small diameters...
I've just "roll sanded" toothpics and bits of small doweling down to size for the builds I've done, or better yet, just get some plastruct or evergreen plastic rods and call it a day... Later! OL JR
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#5
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Unless your feet are held to the fire of historical vernacular I would replace with plastic rod. Either that or should you want to build small scale models I have a photo etch tower set for 1/100th Apollo launches.
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#6
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They are called draw plates (for jewelers?) and I'd picked up a couple sizes/styles for trying to work down small diameter wood dowels into smaller diameter for building Semroc/Estes-style 1/100 Saturn escape towers. They really don't work very well for that purpose--they don't shave off any wood, just sort of mash it smaller and smaller, which makes it denser and denser, making it even harder to work it down more. About the only thing I decided they were helpful on was after I'd sanded into a bit of a wobbly mess they worked fine for cleaning up and making the dowels more of a consistent diameter.
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#7
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Were you drawing it the right way? Through the flat side first? Mine did shave off wood but it was rough and grainy and nowhere near the surface of the commercially available dowels. |
#8
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interesting.
Last edited by VonMises : 04-21-2013 at 12:03 PM. |
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