dowel making

[Jeff Bartley]

Can anyone recommend a good dowel maker or a method of dowel making? I'm looking to make dowels from woods not typically available in dowel stock. So far I've built a router carriage which straddles the lathe but the finish left wasn't great, not bad, but it needed to be sanded. I was hoping to use the dowels right off the lathe. Thanks for any input! Jeff

[Paul Steiner]

A recent issue of pop. woodwork or fine woodwork had 7 uses for an old plane and a dowel maker was one use for an old plane iron. I was skeptical that it would work but once I dialed it in it worked very well with a sharp iron. I made about 100 18" dowels with my students. I have the magazine at work if I can find it I will let you know.

[Jeff Bartley]

Thanks Paul! I've considered doing something along that route. LV has a dowel making system but at $370 it's out of the budget. I also thought about some of the older burr-type dowel makers but I have no experience with any of those. Hopefully someone will chime in with info on those.
I may try a dowel plate too, but the dowels I want to make are 1/2" and 5/8"; not sure what it would be like to pound those through a dowel plate.

[Joe Bradshaw]

Jeff, depending on the length of your dowels, a roundover bit in your router table will work fine. Start with square piece and round over each edge. A little adjusting and you will have a round dowel.

[Tony Joyce]

This is what I use.
224468
Once dialed in you wouldn't believe the quality of the finish it leaves. 1/4" - 1" diameters, by sixteenths. Not cheap, but worth it.

Tony

[Thomas Hotchkin]

Jeff
+ what Joe said. Make them longer then you need, and leave a square on each end of dowel, makes rounding over easier. If there are going to be long dowels leave a island in center or more islands if dowel is small and will flex while rounding over. You can trim them off later. Tom

[Richard Wolf]

These rotary planes work great. I have the whole set with trapping plane and motorized head unit to build chairs with. but one or two can be used on your lathe.
http://www.ashemcrafts.com/

[Marcus Isaacson]

While it may not give a perfect finish, I just had to dig up info about this on the web and this is what I cam across. It works pretty well, may need a little sanding depending on what blade you use but you can just hold a piece of sand paper over it while you crank up the drill. It took me two tries to position the hole to get the result that I wanted but total time invested was about 5 min, a scrap of wood and a jigsaw blade. I needed it to make walnut dowels and it works well. A good part is that you can make any size dowel you want, pending you have that size drill bit.
224505

[Thomas L. Miller]

Jeff,
LN makes a dowel plate. It's very easy to use. It will make multiple sizes of dowels. Here's the link.
http://www.lie-nielsen.com/catalog.php?sku=DP
Hope this helps.
Tom

[Jeff Bartley]

Thanks for the info fellas! It's amazing how many different techniques are used to make a dowel! I tried a couple different router bits today on the router carriage for the lathe and found that a core box bit left a surface that needed just a small amount of sanding. I'd like to try some of the other methods though. The neander in me would really like to try out those rotary planes! The jigsaw blade jig looks cool too. I googled 'dowel makers' earlier and there was a video of a guy who drilled three holes in a piece of flat steel, the center hole was larger than the outer holes and he used a drill to spin the stock through the hole. Pretty simple! Now I wonder what the fastest method is????

[Lee Schierer]

Jeff, depending on the length of your dowels, a roundover bit in your router table will work fine. Start with square piece and round over each edge. A little adjusting and you will have a round dowel.

You can make dowels this way, I have, but I recommend using a fence and feather boards to hold the stock down and tight to the fence, as the bearing will ride on the round part and tend to let the cutting edge dig in. After the first pass rotate the stock so the rounded surface is up and against the fence leaving the flat face down against the table each time. There really is no need to leave square areas if you follow this procedure and there is no length limit

[Phil Thien]

While it may not give a perfect finish, I just had to dig up info about this on the web and this is what I cam across. It works pretty well, may need a little sanding depending on what blade you use but you can just hold a piece of sand paper over it while you crank up the drill. It took me two tries to position the hole to get the result that I wanted but total time invested was about 5 min, a scrap of wood and a jigsaw blade. I needed it to make walnut dowels and it works well. A good part is that you can make any size dowel you want, pending you have that size drill bit.
224505

Could someone explain how this works? How do you get a piece of wood with a square cross-section round with this jig?

[Jeff Bartley]

Phil, check out this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR9-gdNdZAA
Basically, you round over both ends of a section of octagonal stock, one end gets chucked into a drill, the other gets inserted into the jig. Spin the drill and push!
As cool as that set up is, I still wish I could afford the veritas dowel system!!

[Phil Thien]

Thanks for the youtube link, Jeff. Drilling holes in steel that isn't secured as pretty scary stuff, but the jig does look to work well.

[Jeff Bartley]

Especially the big hole in the center!! Brave for sure!

[Chad Bender]

You've already got a bunch of good suggestions, but I'll add one more. If all you need are relatively short 1-2" pieces for plugging holes or pinning tenons, the Lee Valley Dowel Plug & Tenon Cutters work great. I have a 3/8" one that I routinely use in the drill press to make tenon pins.

[Paul Steiner]

The november 2011 issue of popular woodworking has the plans for the dowel cutter. Its worth a try.