Pegging out

In a previous post (the Nacimiento) I complained about not being able to make very small pegs. Fortunately, my bedtime reading includes that marvellous classic, The Anatomy of Nelson's Ships by C. Nepean Longridge, fortunately published anew by the US Naval Institute. Dr Nepean was a past master at making very small things. He needed zillions of tiny pegs, 2mm and less, to secure the planking and decking of his "small" model of HMS Victory, and how did he do it? With a drawplate, of course.
As soon as I read Dr Nepean's wise words, I felt silly. Why, I use a drawplate myself in full size! I use much thicker metal, of course, and I still have to tackle drilling a 13mm hole through a big thick piece of metal for full-size to be really useful, but never mind. For this job, even a tin can would do as a plate. But I have a stiffer piece of sheet metal off some long-discarded appliance, and I used that. What you do is drill a series of successively smaller holes in it. I started at 4mm and went down by 0.5mm, all the way down to 1mm. I have a set of machinist's drills, 6mm to 1mm by tenths, which makes this easy. I think that to get down to 1mm I'd have to start at 2mm and go down by 0.2 or so -- a 1mm peg is skinny indeed.

So, what you do is what I am doing in the pic above. Start by knifing down so your future peg is a wee bit larger than your largest hole. Hammer it through. Pick it out of where it fell (these things have an amazing attraction for floors. Maybe that's how Newton thought up gravity; he kept on dropping things on the floor and had to crawl around looking for them. Don't give me that apple tree stuff). Then you hammer it down the next hole, and so on till you reach the desired diameter. The drawplate is amazingly effective. Good to 2mm easily on Lilac scraps. One mm is just a wee bit too small; I think I could go to 1.5 mm without trouble.

I have, by the way, a lilac tree that, like Darth Vader, wants to conquer the known universe in general and my house in particular. So this summer I restrained his expansionist tendencies. I pruned him. I kept the prunings and I'm glad I did. It is a very nice wood for things like pegs and canoe ribs (in miniature; see Tippecanoe posts). It bends well, can be shaved down to nothing. And the Finns use it for rake tines! A much underrated wood. And a much better thing to do with wood than to burn it.