Thread: Making Japanese wooden nails? Any clues?

I would make up a pencil sharpener type arrangement with a Stanley plane blade. Put a piece of dowel in the battery drill chuck, taper, cut to length, taper the next bit, cut to length, etc.
Check Mathias Wandle's site. He made up a similar thing to make accurately sized dowel. I'll see if I can find it....
Making dowels - the pencil sharpener method
Found it.

Vague memory of another thread on here somewhere about them. I think they were toasted bamboo or something. So maybe do a search on here. Or maybe search "bamboo nails"?

Toasted bamboo! Sounds...not all that yummy, actually...

I was going to suggest the Wandell sharpener, too!

How important is the piece you're going to make? I've always found that compromising on things like the wooden nails leaves a feeling of "shoulda bought those". Three bucks a nail doesn't seem to be overly expensive.

My Mrs has just come up with a good idea. Japanese chopsticks are round and could be cut to length as required! They must be Japanese chopsticks though. They are the round ones, Chinese are not.8 I'm sure you can find a cheap source of plain wooden chopsticks.

Regards,

Rob

I was laying in bed, letting the old brick rest, when Eureka!

How about this:

- cut stock into 1/4" wide (or appropriate size) rods on the table saw or bandsaw.
- cut the rods into Desired Length plus 1/2"
- mount the length into an electric drill
- use my big home made lathe sanding disk on a sensible speed
- drill on, angle set, press to sanding disk
- riches!

Another thought would be to drill a bit of stock with the right sized hole, cut through it on an angle like a pencil sharpener and mount that as a jig against the sanding disk. As I insert the rod (drill a-buzzing) it will force the rod to the right angle and give me a stop for length too.

I'll give it a crack tomorrow.

I never knew that they were supposed to have a name and be exclusively from one country!

Besides plain bamboo chopsticks, I use 3 different sizes of bamboo meat skewers.
Regular drill bits, cylindrical holes, the flush-cut saw, as described.
Umbrella stands & pirate's treasure chests, they nail together just fine.
The bamboo makes really nice accents in the darker western red cedar.

I peg a lot of furniture together , English style riven trenails is what I think of them as . The Egyptians must have started it though ?
I like the look of those tapered drill bits to match .

In the old days they were split off a block with a riving iron then hammered through a dowling plate , if you need a taper to help start them in the hole , four downward slices with a chisel.

When I need them I just pick straight grained timber, saw 500mm lengths on the table saw , group them together in rectangular packs with a wrap of tape around one end. Then when I need them I saw the length I want off on the band saw and hammer through the dowling plate.

Somethings I assemble have 40 pegs , I sure wouldn't want to be buying them in .

I was reading this just the other day.

TT