On Tue, 11 Jul 2006 17:08:43 -0400, Doug Payne
wrote:

Nope, haven't seen it. I don't subscribe, but I do on very rare
occasions buy a copy from the newsstand. What article is that, or should
I ask?

Pyramid-headed square pegs, formed on the ends of round pegs so that
they're easy to drop into arbitrarily placed drilled holes.

Now I do tend to over-react a little to some issues of artistic purity.
Think of it as OCD with chainsaws. I take my view of "Art & Crafts"
_very_ seriously. I regard Ruskin as a dangerous compromiser and
moderate voice, whilst Gimson was a bourgeois dilettante.

My idea of learning to make "arts and crafts furniture" begins by
spending a few years working with timber framers until you understand
pegged tenon joints. _Then_ you can think about putting pyramid headed
pegs into small carcase furniture.

I don't (and won't) use pegs for decoration alone - they're a structural
component of the joint. Quite often the whole piece is unglued anyway,
and it really is just the friction of the peg holding things together.
So not only do I care how I form the heads, but I care where I place the
pegs too. If you see a peg in any of my work, it's holding a joint
together. I'd no more use a superfluous peg than I'd use rainforest
timber.


My favourite method of making pyramid heads is a short article in the
back of FWW some year ago. A short highly skewed chisel with a rounded
ball handle. Use it to pare off each face in turn.

My quickest way of making them (usually for the 1/8" blackwood pegs I
use to hold trays together) is a low-angle block plane and a custom-made
angled shooting board. I bandsaw lots of strip, cut it to double
lengths, plane the ends, then separate in the middle. A twist of the
fingers between some sandpaper and they're ready to go in the hole.