This site is great! But instead of just a few questions, now I have tons of questions.

I have been buying 3/4" and 1" dowels from Home Depot,,, birch wood I think? It turns terribly as it requires lots of tools pressure and comes off in small splinters, not nice chips. Does any one else have this problem or is it that my tools are cheap or dull. Could it be my lath speed?

If it is the wood does anyone have any other recommendations. I have tried bass wood, poplar and cedar and they seem to be a slight improvement over the birch.

usually when you buy dowels they are 'hardened'......don't know exactly what they do ,but they do it .
you might want to try a faster speed on your lathe & sharpening your tools ..might help .
derf

I generally like to turn at 1700rpm or more and I sharpen my tools all the time. If you are using scrapers to scrape you will find that having a burr will cut off a better chip.

That happens to me to, i guess its just the wood. The shavings get really hot and the tools get warm and discolored. :-}

If the tool is turning colors, you are spinning the wood too fast and your tools are dull. I use these dowels and the key is keeping your chisels sharp. Also use the right chisel for the job. Removing large quanities is best done with the gouge to rough shape. Then the skew or whatever else. Finally sand it withn 60 grit first, then 150 then 220 and you will get a smooth finish.

Thanks guys,,,,I'll have to sharpen my tools.

Sanding is the key, although is does sound like your chisels are dull. They shouldn't burn. Birch is the volume standard wood for dowels. Even makers of maple furniture will use birch turnings because it's cheaper than maple and easier to turn.

I'm looking for maple dowels or squares and found some at Thompson Maple Products in PA. The base price for kiln-dried 1-3/8" x 8-7/8" maple dowels is 9 cents. But they get $25.00 for packing up 200 of them and another $24 or so for shipping FedEx. So they're about 35 cents each. I'm gonna get 200 and try them out.

I've been making some plugs out of cherry because I found some nice 1-1/4" cherry boards (leftovers about 10' wide and 3 feet long) at Mancini's in N. Kingstown, for $3 each. Cherry often has a wierd grain, though, and they often split diagonally across the plug. But cherry is more dense than birch, although not as dense as maple.

Maple at Home Depot in N.K. was rediculously expensive and too thin for anything but needles. They didn't have any maple dowels. A guy tried to sell me an oak stick, 1-1/4" square by three feet long for $14. HD obviously wants it more than I do!

Sharpen those chisels and you should be okay.

Hey Derf:

How's your Grizzly working out? Have any pieces broken or bent yet?

I've received four replacement parts so far from Grizzly. The one-year warranty is worth its weight in steel! :af:

If nothing's broken yet on yours, keep your order number and serial number handy. I haven't been abusing mine and things keep on breaking. That's what happens, I guess, with cheap Chinese castings.

BUT, the thing really works great when its parts are whole!

That's a great source Bob, thanks. I use cherry also and yes it can split on ya.

hi Bob
i didn't buy the grizley ....got burnt one time before(not grizley). i bought the delta ,only had time to unpack it ,sharpen chisels& make a little dust to check it out . :(
been too busy working on the house to realy get any turning time in time.gotta get busy & make me some big poppers for the cobia in june !!!
does thompson maple have a web site??or where are they in pa ? maybe they are close to me :)
derf

Thompson Maple Products is in Corry, PA. They have a website. Their name is their address.

I wish I'd bought the Delta or the Jet. The Grizzly works fine but a lot of parts break. They replace them with just an email request, though, and they do it for free. But that'll only last a year.

Derf & Slip:

Thompson doesn't like to ship in small quantities. They will, but the packing cost is somewhat high. If you, or anyone else for that matter, would like to get together and arrange a large order, we might be able to get the per dowel cost down a little bit. They advertise a lot of sizes but don't seem to actually have many of what their website advertises in stock. But we could probably get whatever we want if we could order a few thousand.

I'd prefer some 1-1/4' x 12" or 13". I could get two plugs per piece, that way, and the cost would be lower.

But hell, at 35 cents a piece for 200, they're about what a four foot birch dowel costs at HD! I think at HD a 4 foot 1-1/8" is over $4. My 200 will last me a few years at the current rate but you can never have too much wood!!

BTW, they don't accept credit cards, requiring instead money orders or bank checks.