Laurier Wood Craft - Benefits of our dowel pins

Makers of the Expansible Dowel Pin

What is the difference ?
Multi groove dowel pins manufactured on molders are by nature oval in cross section. The cutters are profile ground and cannot have any clearance angles ground into them, allowing them to be face ground without changing the profile. As a result the cutters do not cut vertically and the resulting dowel is shaped like a lemon, some as much as .020" out of round. Pins that are oval in cross section will not have continuous contact with the hole. Glue by itself has no tensile strength and a joint formed by a badly out of round pin will not bond chemically with the wood.

Pins with multiple straight grooves bond initially but fail later as they shrink away from the sides of the hole breaking their bond as the moisture dissipates. Pins with one spiral groove cut into a smooth dowel shear the glue from their surface and are only designed to relieve hydraulic lock.

Pre-glued pins, what can I say, no one seems to want to answer questions like;

Will the glue harden if they are stored in a humid area ?

Will the glue harden with age ?

If the pin is manufactured with the usual tolerances and then coated with glue won't it be very tight in the hole ?

If water is squirted into the hole won't most of it be absorbed by the lumber and cause the lumber to swell in localized spots ? If this moisture hasn't dissipated by the time the lumber is sanded won't the resulting high spots be sanded down, leaving depressions at each dowel when the wood does finally dry ? If the material used is a compressed board product the material won't shrink back to it's original dimension resulting in the overlying veneer to be sanded thin or even sanded through.

Joints assembled with biscuit joiner plates can shift during clamping making your furniture and panels out of square and misaligned. This problem is often not noticed until the glue has dried and the damage is done. Joiner plates quite often are not the same thickness as the slot milled, leaving a sloppy joint that has the same inherent problems as an "out of round" dowel pin.

Laurier Wood Craft
Phone: (705) 386-1274 / Fax: (705) 386-2749
P.O. Box 428, South River Ontario, P0A 1X0 Canada
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