Thong hoops around each end of the drum, leather thong lacing, and small wooden dowels slipped under the lacings control the skin tension.
In the late 19th century this had already occurred to a large extent, the chairmaker's kit of tools invariably including a dowel plate with a series of holes through which the craftsman hammered roughly squared pegs to form the dowels.
Skin tension is maintained by thong lacings and wooden dowels that are tapped with a hammer in retuning.
They were used for bonding masonry (dowels and clamps), for tension members (chains strengthening domes, tie rods across arches to reinforce the vaults), and for roofing, doors, windows, and decoration.
Today machine-made dowels are universal, with a glue-escape slot cut in.
Constructed sculpture is made out of such basic preformed components as metal tubes, rods, plates, bars, and sheets; wooden laths, planks, dowels, and blocks; laminated timbers and chipboards; sheets of Perspex, Formica, and glass; fabrics; and wires and threads.
I brought my homemade nunchaku (two long dowels tied together with a shoelace), wore the biking gloves I'd painted to look like Mel Gibson's, and taped a steak knife to my leg.
The collection includes necklaces made from heavy chains for hanging chandeliers and others decorated with drawer pulls; wooden dowels as pendants; leather cuffs studded with upholstery nails; and brass beads from a lighting catalogue strung onto black silk ribbon — Lanvin meets macaroni-shell necklace from summer-camp arts-and-crafts class.
In another part of the gallery, a young woman with a lug-nut washer tattooed on her shoulder was daubing aquamarine paint on a cascade of small wooden dowels.
Ramin turned up in the West in countless cheap items: paintbrushes, two-dollar pool cues, dowels.
The sculpture class for the evening was over, but several people were still at work on red clay nudes, supported by dowels and wire armatures.
