Mastodawn

It's surprisingly hard to buy 8×50 mm fluted wooden #dowels.

The local #DIY and building supplies shops in the nearby towns, and even over in the Big City, do not stock this (apparently unusual) size.

I found a nice little family-run mail order business in #Yorkshire that sold them, only to go all of the way through its WWW site checkout process and find that although it says that it accepts credit cards, that means only accepting Chinese UnionPay credit cards, and no other kinds.

I found another place that will sell me a pack of 100, and charge me an additional twice the item value as shipping.

I only need 4.

Perhaps 6 in case I break/ruin a couple trying to put them back in to the piece of furniture where the original dowels snapped (and I had to drill them out).

#CreditCards

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Forgotten Hero 5d ago

@JdeBP

Get some 8mm dowel.
Put a few groves along the length to allow the glue to flow.
Saw into 50mm lengths, or 48 or 127 whatever you want!
Chamfer the ends, an old-fashioned pencil sharpener works best!

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JdeBP

@ForgottenHero18

I had been considering this. Again, it's surprisingly hard.

#Wickes, for instance, doesn't sell 8mm dowel rods. The only diameters available seem to be multiples of 3mm. (This might actually turn out to be the right choice. The dowels that I removed are 8mm, but the process of removal of the broken-off stubs, which involved a bit of drilling at an awkward angle, might have enlarged the holes.)

B&Q does sell 8mm rods, but in metre lengths, about 4 times as much as I actually need.

The hidden cost of this route is, though, that it would involve also buying a saw, as all of my saws, even my smallest-toothed hand saw, are impractical for accurately cutting something that small.

My best bet if I go down this route is borrowing a smaller hand saw off a relative, which unfortunately incurs the alternative hidden cost of spending several days tidying the relative's stuff to physically access it. (-:

On the gripping hand, I'm conscious of the fact that the way that the dowels snapped indicates that they are the structural weak points, and cannot bear the load that this piece of furniture is now subject to.

I'm looking for extra supports that I can screw on as well, to take some of the load off elsewhere, but I'm also thinking of upgrading from wooden to steel #dowels.

Which are a different kettle of fish yet again when it comes to mail order and finding the right type and size. (-:

#DIY

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Forgotten Hero 4d ago

@JdeBP

A dowel should not bear the load, they just hold the joint in place.
You may need to change the design!

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JdeBP 4d ago

@ForgottenHero18

It wasn't my design. Pre-designed flat-pack.

Hence the add-on supports search.

Even that's not trivial. Some fancy support systems designed for exactly this exist, but it turns out that they screw on to the very cross-piece that is jointed by the snapped #dowels to the uprights, so it's still loaded. I'm a bit suspicious.

More generic support legs, applicable (the vendors say) to a wide range of furniture, and placed on the screwed-on cross-pieces instead, seem a better choice. I'm thinking about improving on those screws, too. Angle brackets or something.

I've been looking into whether to go with metal or hard plastic. At least one type of the latter is also a bit suspect, given that it doesn't give the max load in metric and doesn't have a proper spec sheet.

And there's an awful lot of corner-cut crap to scroll past that does things like sell the same system as sold by others more cheaply by quietly not including the piece for the foot. (-:

#DIY

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Forgotten Hero 4d ago

@JdeBP
It sounds like it WILL be your design before long.