Nice technique for a heavy-duty gluing dowel!
Now that you mention it, I’ve even used a similar trick to anchor a lag screw into stone. ?With one additional dodge that let me tighten it afterwards. ?(This was to fasten the bottom end of a doorstep rail into a big slab of sandstone. ? Sandstone drills easily with a carbide bit and hammer drill, but a shallow anchorage in it can split out — so I made about an 8” hole, 3/4” diameter, and wound up an 8” long 1/2” lag screw with epoxy-soaked steel wool and shoved it in. ?With a little bit of empty space in front. ?This let me tighten it after the epoxy had firmed up.
The Gougeon Brothers show a similar epoxy-assisted method for anchoring heavy screws into wood, such as to install a winch on a big boat: ?
— drill a way-oversize hole for 2/3 the screw depth, and then for the rest of the depth drill a normal pilot hole for that screw size. ?
— Fill the hole about halfway with fiber-filled epoxy, so that when the screw’s added the epoxy will fill the hole the rest of the way. ?
— Install the screw and whatever it’s attaching, but only gently, yet.
— Let the epoxy set fully and then tighten the screw fully.
The point of the way-oversize hole is that the fiberfilled epoxy is stronger than the wood, so it takes the load from the screw threads and distributes it to the surface of a much larger hole, so the screw doesn’t strip the wood.
Their whole book’s been posted by their company as a free PDF these days, by the way — google “The Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction.”
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I second what Mark said about epoxy and threaded rod. This is an awesome repair technique for lots of things, not just rudders. You drill a hole just a little bigger than the rod, and fill it partially with thickened epoxy, then push the rod in. The epoxy of course grips the wood, and it also grips the rod because of the thread. A smooth rod wouldn’t work nearly as well. I have used this for many repairs.
