Horizontal boring machine question

[Rick Potter]

I picked up a Ritter single spindle horizontal boring machine a while back, and want to use it for glueing up panels using dowels. It works great, but sometimes I am just a tad off matching holes from one board to another. (Talking about side to side matching.) This makes it difficult to align the boards.

I am doing this by pencil mark, and obviously eyeball some of them slightly wrong. Does anyone have any experience building a table to mount to the machine that would allow me to get the dowel holes consistantly the same distance apart?

I am thinking of a table that slides side to side with stops built into the fence somehow. I imagine you would start at the center of each workpiece and work out to the sides with the dowel holes.

I don't want to reinvent the wheel if there is a way to do this that I am not aware of.

Any help appreciated.

Rick Potter

[Jamie Buxton]

Instead of dowels, could you use loose tenons? They'd be shaped like the parts used by the Festool Domino. Heck, you could even buy the Domino parts if you don't want to make your own. On the horizontal boring machine, you'd plunge the bit, then move the board sideways to make a mortise. There's two advantages over the dowels. First, it gets you out of the alignment problem you're having with the dowels. Second, you can get more facegrain-to-facegrain glue area than a dowel provides.

[Jeff Duncan]

If your talking about flat panels I can't see any advantage to using dowels.....a lot of disadvantages, but no advantages:confused: For flat panels if one really needs alignment aids then biscuits are the go to solution.

But that wasn't your question....so as far as using a fence system I think I'd do it differently. I think making a bed/fence setup similar to a chopsaw station may be a better way to go? Then you can set up flip down stops anywhere you need and maintain consistency.

good luck,
JeffD

[Mel Fulks]

I agree with Jeff on all points here. Consensus from reports and actual tests is they don't help .

[Rick Potter]

No time to fool with it now anyway. Put it away and did the panels with my biscuit joiner.

Rick P.