Glen-L.com

This may be obvious to all you builders, but it wasn't to me. If I save someone the aggravation I had, this post is not a waste.

I had about 200 holes to plug after my planking, so I bought a tapered plug cutter at Rockler and proceeded to use all my scrap 3/8" planking material to make the 200 plugs. This is the cutter I bought.


The problem I had is that the 3/8" material did not provide enough depth of wood to get the taper down to under my hole size of 3/8". The smaller part of the plug is higher up in the cutter, so you should use material over 1/2" thick to make your plugs. Since I used 3/8" material, all the plugs I had were a little too large to fit the holes. Like a dummy, I sanded a little chamfer on the plugs to get them in.

I should have bit the bullet and just made new bungs. You should also test your countersink holes and plugs before you make 200 of them.

Another live and learn moment.

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Bob
Completed Malahini (launched 6/24/2012)
http://bobsboatbuild.blogspot.com/

Thanks for the information. I'm new to this, and was thinking about this the other day.

another trick.... so you don't need to chase these things all around your floor...

Set the depth stop on your drill press so that your cutting stops about 1/32" from the bottom of the wood. Then all of your bungs will be on a sheet that you can just pull apart with your fingers. The little tabs make them easier to position and hammer into place... the tabs also make it easier to visually align grain direction when you position the bungs for hammering in.

Mine looked like this when they went on the boat... a quick dressing with a scary sharp chisel, and these were flush.

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Bruce.

~~ Do what you love, and love what you do. ~~
~~ To me - only my boat is not yet perfect. Everybody else's is to be admired for I know the path they have walked (Dave Lott, 2010) ~~
Dow's Monaco Project