The following is taken from a little book entitled – BOWMAN’S HANDBOOK Technical Notes and Gadgets for the Practical Archer Part 1 of this book - Technical Notes on Archery – from which this article comes was written by one Lieut. Cdr. W. F. Paterson. The book is undated and has no ISBN number but may have been published under the aegis of the Grand National Archery Society of Great Britain sometime in the 1940s or 1950s. Almost all of the articles in the book appear to have been published in its journal, ‘The British Archer’. I have scanned the text by OCR and reproduced the images by scanning into Photoshop. Dennis La Varenne 11th August, 2004
		DOWEL CUTTING
	After a few tests I found that the best way to use the cutter was first to trim down the squares by planing as far as possible to a round section, next to trim up one end and fit the pile, and then to slide the cutter over the pile and to grip the protruding point of the latter in the lathe-chuck, the untrimmed nock end of the shaft of course being supported in the sliding block as before. When the shaft is spinning the cutter can be steadily worked along to the end until all rough wood has been trimmed away. A light rubbing with glass-paper finishes the job and a true shaft slightly less than 5/16 in results. The sides of the central hole in the cutter are broken by three slots where the smaller holes cut into it: each alternate edge of these slots acts as a plane—three blades in all: if the face of the plate is trimmed down with a file at the edge of the centre hole and behind each cutting edge more rapid trimming results. The sides of a packing case provided some 30 in. lengths of pine-wood, dry and firm, straight-grained and free from knots. These cut into ˝ in. squares gave me eighteen pieces to work upon. A length of 3 in. x 2 in. with a "V'' groove cut along the narrower side, and a yard long, when held in the vice, made planing easy. By placing the squares in the groove and planing off the corners, turning the shaft after each stroke or two of the plane, they soon worked down to about 3/8 in. thick and very nearly round. At this stage one end of a shaft was gripped in the lathe chuck and the other slipped into a hole in a block of wood drilled at centre height,— the block being fitted with guides to allow it to slide to and fro on the lathe bed. By spinning the shaft with a sheet of fine glass-paper wrapped round it and moved steadily from one end to the other of the shaft the diameter quickly came down to 5/16in. throughout, and far more true than I had hoped it would be.