The task today is to complete as much of the wooden mug holder as possible. The means making the mug supports and the holder support and putting all the bits together.

The mug supports are going to be made from 10mm diameter Ash dowel, also known as arrow shafts. I cut four pieces, two longer and two shorter.

A 10mm hole was drilling right through a piece of scrap wood...

...and the arrow shaft, sorry the piece of dowel pushed Into the wood so that it was flush on the underside. This was passed over the table saw so that a slot was cut through the dowel.

Like this.

The result is a nice slot in the end of the dowel.

Repeat for the rest of the dowels, like so.

The slotted ends were then cut at a 45 digress angle.

Finally, splines were cut and glued into the dowels so that two pieces of dowel were joined at right-angles by what is known as a splined mitre joint. The joined dowels were then placed on the warm Rayburn to dry for later. Above the dowels you can see the holder support. Later on I shall try to join all these pieces together and hope that it all doesn't fall apart.

For now, lunchtime is over, time to get back to work.

Here are the dowels trimmed and sanded.

With small but effective splines.

These are the parts I've made so far, now to put them all together.

First some holes into which the dowels will fit.

Like this. Only there's a problem. You can't easily get glue on the dowels and the rest of the holder at the same time.

So I had to think of another way to fix the dowels in place.

The dowels were fairly well constrained without any fixings, but not well enough.

So I drilled 1mm holes and tapped in some 1.6mm copper nails. Two in the ring...

...and two in the holder.

Trim off the excess and it's almost done.

At the moment it's a wooden glass holder. there's nowhere for the mug's handle.

Quick work with a sharp pull saw and there you are, a gap for the handle.

Not too shabby at all.

The boat mug securely held in the mug holder.

Looks quite nice on the boat.

I think this will do very nicely, not as strong as the first one, but better looking.

A light sand and a few coats of varnish and that will be a task completed.