Making 5/8" Sticks: A Cheap(ish) Hack

The Veritas 5/8” tapered tenon cutter with a curved blade. This hacked tool is a stick-making monster.

If you need to make a lot of 5/8"-diameter sticks (like I have to sometimes), here is a hack that I stumbled on a few months ago. If you own a Veritas 5/8" Tapered Tenon Cutter, then you already own everything you need.

So here’s the deal. If you drive a stick into the Veritas 5/8" Tapered Tenon Cutter with its factory-supplied straight blade, then the tool spits out a tapered tenon. And the 5/8" stub at the tenon’s tip is chewed-up garbage.

But if you put a curved blade in the tool (a 7"-radius curve is ideal) and drive a stick through the tool, you get a perfect 5/8"-diameter stick that’s ready for a little cleaning up to be used in a chair.

This is a far cheaper alternative to buying the Veritas Dowel Maker. And it is a far more durable stick-making machine compared to the wooden-bodied 5/8" Rounding Plane from Ray Iles.

I got the idea from Veritas. The company offers tenon/dowel cutters up to 1/2" diameter. This tool looks and works the same as the tapered tenon cutters, except for the fact that it has a curved blade.