Ouch. Sorry about that. It's the cold. Here's where all those bungs come from.
All those bungs you've been seeing in the hull... they don't come from the Rhode Island Bung Supply and Liquor Emporium, we make them ourselves. We make them from scrap planking wood, and that's the best possible source. Not only does the bung wood match the plank wood exactly, it helps us to use our wood more efficiently. You want your bung wood to match your plank wood not only for aesthetic reasons, but for practical ones as well. The perfect bung will expand and contract in exactly the same way as the plank wood, and thus be less likely to work its way loose over time as the planks shrink and swell.
When you see lots of bungs before they've been trimmed, you may notice that they look pretty ragged.
That's a side effect of how we make them. Here's a tour.
We use a drill press with a bung-cutting bit to start.
In case you were wondering, that's an old Walker Turner drill press. It's ancient, and it works like a dream. We have a vacuum hose set up to suck up the chips as we cut the bungs.
We start with a straight-edged board, and hold it up against a fence that's been clamped to the drill press table.
Here we've cut 6 bungs already. the cutter is spinning in this photo, but this is what it looks like when it's still.
(from the MLCS catalog... thanks folks)
The cutter cuts around the plug, and leaves it fastened to the board at the base... provided the board is not too thin. We set the depth that our drill press cuts, and then plane the boards down to be about 1/16" thicker than the bottom of the bung.
The fence makes sure that all our bungs are cut at exactly the same distance from the edge of the board.
We eyeball the side to side distance. You want to cut these out close enough to not waste wood, but not so close that the outer edge of the spinning cutter hits the bung you just made. Doing this can be quite meditative.
You end up with a line of bungs cut along the side of your board.
Here's why it's good that these are all cut at exactly the same distance from the edge. The next step is to cut out your strip of bungs with a table saw (or band saw).
This gives you nice little bung strips.
Because there's not a lot of wood on the underside of the bungs, these strips are pretty flexible. We want that as you'll see in a second.
Next, make up some epoxy and put filler in in to thicken it up a bit. If you spread it out into a puddle it's easier to use, and it doesn't cure too quickly.
You can see that the strip of bungs has been bent and broken a bit there on the left. Leaving a thin backing makes it easy to do this. Bending the strips makes it easier to dip one bung into the epoxy at a time...
it makes it easier to insert one bung at a time into the bung hole...
and lastly, it makes it easy to snap off the bung from the strip after you've pressed it into the hole.
Simple, no? Another advantage to this method is that it makes it very easy to line up the grain of your bung with the grain of your plank. There's a practical reason for this. Wood expands and contracts across the grain, not along it. If you put a bung into a plank with the grain oriented 90 degrees to the plank grain, the bung would expand front to back, while the plank expanded top to bottom. This would eventually break the glue bond between the bung and the plank and cause it to allow water into the screw hole. Not good.
After you press in a lot of bungs, you can come along with a mallet or hammer and drive them in firmly.
It's good to trim them off with a sharp chisel soon after the epoxy dries because these ragged edges like to catch on clothing, hats, flesh... whatever scrapes up against them.
There you go. More about bungs than you ever wanted to know.