I was at a barbecue having shish kebabs on skewers like this and I thought these are thick enough to
be dowels so I shopped around and I found these a package of 50 for four dollars and they're five
millimeters in diameter so let's see if these work as dowels I've often used thin dowels to sort of
pin the trim around the table Edge like this and I think that looks much better than using nails
or something like that they're also kind of Handy for nailing things together like this as long as
there's pilot holes for comparison I made some five millimeter dowels out of Norway maple using
my adult standard this looks fairly elegant but it was actually a fairly frustrating process
so let's compare the breaking strength of my bamboo dowels to the maple ones
I got five centimeters between those two supports
and then measuring the force
and the braking force was 11 kilograms on here
foreign
of the same diameter
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members the bamboo ones were maybe 10 stronger than the maple ones
so let's see how they hold up in an actual joint
five bamboo four Maple ones and the last of each of these I actually drilled the
hole a fair bit smaller so I really had to hammer
the dowel in because I'm curious if that makes a difference [Music]
the way they seem to be failing is not So Much from the dowel snapping or something cracking
but the dollar gradually pulling out so the force increases and then it starts to decrease
as the dollar slides out at that point my tester decides that the joint has failed
well this one was more of a snapping pull out
and this is the one with the undersized hole where I really had to hammer the dowel in
the gradual pull out so I got 25 21 23 20 and 28 kilograms for the
hammered fit so that one did the best unfortunately I only did one with the
hammered ones and now testing my Nori Maple samples foreign
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23.9 the ones with the normal Maple average 24.5 given the variations I can't really say
that one is better than the other I broke all my joints to have a closer look inside of them
looking at all the knocked apart joints they're all a pull out failure essentially the glue
failing to hold the dowel in the hole so I could have used a fair bit longer dial
before there's any risk of it breaking but for my braking test the bamboo dowels did about as
well as the maple ones so I'm pretty sure in terms of breaking from tension strength
that they would be about equivalent for that too and what else can I use five millimeter
bamboo that was for well they're really handy as alignment pins for picture frame miter joints