Matt Meiser
02-02-2008, 3:08 PM
I received my Dowelmax this week and spent a few minutes playing around with it between work and other other projects. So far it looks pretty good. I doweled the three pieces shown below together in less than 10 minutes and today I glued them up to see how strong they were. I'm impressed as I put about as much force on them as I think some of my M&T joints would have taken and they were solid. I'm also impressed by the precision of the joints. Where the first 3/4" x 2" piece meets the second they joints are level. There's a slight gap on one side because the end of the piece wasn't cut absolutely straight, but the dowels are. where the rail meets the 1-3/4" square stock I wanted an 1/8" offset like I would typically use where an apron meets a table leg. Since the Dowelmax doesn't have a 1/8" spacer, I just put two 1/8" thick washers in and drilled the holes.
There are two less-than-perfect things I noticed doing this. They aren't things that are deal breakers but I thought I'd point them out. First, in true 2" wide stock, there really isn't room for 3 dowels but having 2 puts them pretty far from the far edge. You could probably drill the third hole but there wouldn't be much stock between the hole and the edge. Now typically where I'm using 2" stock it is for face frames where I'll probably still use pocket screws, or doors with either a cope and stick or stub tenon profile so I probably wouldn't dowel them And in either case two dowels would be plenty strong IMHO. Second, the DM is definitely a lot messier than a Domino would have been. Just from drilling these joints I have a decent pile of chips on my bench. At least they are chips and not fine dust like a router mortising jig would make. And I'm confident its a lot quieter than a Domino.
There are a suprising number of pieces for this thing with the spacers, alignment pins, etc. I'm thinking of getting a Festool Systainer to keep everything in instead of just throwing it in a drawer so that I can have everything handy when working.
Overall, I'm satisfied so far. Hopefully I'll get to work on a real project to try it on soon. It came a few days late to use it on my current project which I glued up the night before the post office tried the first time to deliver this. And today I completed the sanding on that project and will be starting the finishing process tomorrow.
There are two less-than-perfect things I noticed doing this. They aren't things that are deal breakers but I thought I'd point them out. First, in true 2" wide stock, there really isn't room for 3 dowels but having 2 puts them pretty far from the far edge. You could probably drill the third hole but there wouldn't be much stock between the hole and the edge. Now typically where I'm using 2" stock it is for face frames where I'll probably still use pocket screws, or doors with either a cope and stick or stub tenon profile so I probably wouldn't dowel them And in either case two dowels would be plenty strong IMHO. Second, the DM is definitely a lot messier than a Domino would have been. Just from drilling these joints I have a decent pile of chips on my bench. At least they are chips and not fine dust like a router mortising jig would make. And I'm confident its a lot quieter than a Domino.
There are a suprising number of pieces for this thing with the spacers, alignment pins, etc. I'm thinking of getting a Festool Systainer to keep everything in instead of just throwing it in a drawer so that I can have everything handy when working.
Overall, I'm satisfied so far. Hopefully I'll get to work on a real project to try it on soon. It came a few days late to use it on my current project which I glued up the night before the post office tried the first time to deliver this. And today I completed the sanding on that project and will be starting the finishing process tomorrow.