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Boring Job

Here are some photos of one of the things I've been up to at work. If you look closely at the pictures I posted earlier you can see that the center of each hole is lined with a wooden dowel. This is done to give strength to the fluted form. We thought about all the ways we could go about getting these hollow dowels and finally settled on just making them ourselves. I put together this jig to do just that. The Wawona sculpture will have more then a thousand of those fluted forms, so we are going to need a lot of these bored out dowels.

It's just made from glued together stacks of plywood, There are two holes drilled to hold each size of the dowels we are working with. There is a toggle clamp that quickly holds and releases the other brace. The brace holds the dowels in place through tension but the larger dowels still liked to spin in there when being drilled so I added some screws so the tips barely poke out the other side and that is enough to hold it in place.

 The longest dowels I'm drilling are 6" long. This speed bore bit will actually take out the material super fast but you need to control your speed and not go to fast. If you go to fast it is really easy to split this wood and going to fast causes the bit to travel off the center and you end up off center by the time you reach the bottom.

 I found that if you try to drill all the way through with the whole bit that it causes the wood to split on occasion, so rather then drilling all the way through I just go until the tip pokes out and then trim off about half an inch to finish it.

 Then you have one bored out dowel.

 One down, a thousand more to go.

I'm not sure how many are in that bag, but it better be close to what we need. I'm starting to get a little bored with boring.