Here's Something Fun

Today's post is another one of those "engineer monkeying around in the garage" posts. It's fun though, because it's the first productive usage of the mill drill that that I've had in my garage for the last couple of years. It's not on its table yet, so I have to work on my knees, but that will come.

Anyway, the foot rest on one of our kitchen chairs broke. You can see the mis-colored piece in the picture. This was a test fit of the test piece.

And when I say it broke, I mean it really broke. The tenon broke off of one side. Behold. Normally to fix this you would need complex woodworking machinery including (but not limited to) router, this cool jig, and a table saw.

So after I thought about it for a while I came up with this idea to use three dowels to replace the oval shaped tenon. Here's a picture of what they look like while drilling the hole. 

 

I used a forstner bit so that I could drill away part of the adjoining dowel. Regular drill bits would wander when adjacent to a dowel, but forstners are designed to drill a hole with essentially a flat bottom. Here's a shot of the setup. I had to put the drill head all the way at the top of it's travel to fit the piece. I held the bit with a 3/8" R8 collet.  

 Here's a shot of drilling the test piece. You can see how the middle dowel gets partially consumed. This worked out really well because it allowed each dowel to fit very snugly with the next.

 Here's a shot of drilling the actual part.

Now my chair is all back to good. Finally.

Well that was fun. Now I have to get the lathe going so I can make some bike tools.