Hello,
Novice woodworker here in the middle of my first real project. Building a dresser for my 2yo daughter out of hard maple and ran into an issue. I am using the project to learn some new joinery (dowels - mainly using exposed) and realized that I didn't plan the project through all the way.
I have two dowels (centered and evenly spaced) going into the side panel horizontal piece at the bottom. However, when I go to connect the long stretcher to connect the two panels, the new dowels would cut through the existing ones. The person I got the plans from I believe just glued in this piece (which is not enough to properly secure it, in my opinion). Any creative solutions here? - I have three theories:
1) Just move the stretcher up a couple inches rather than flush on the floor. This seems to be the logical thing to do. Not sure if that would impact stability, though I *will* have the dresser anchored to a stud in the wall.
2) If I hadn't already finished one of the panels, I could have been creative with mortising the first connection to overlap, and then just using dowels for the stretcher. Bit late now, but I think that would have worked.
3) Drill the stretcher dowel holes just short of the existing dowels so they don't interact. Feels too shallow to me to be useful. Dowels are 3/8", and the legs are 1 1/2", so not sure there's enough room to just drill around them.
Note that the third picture doesn't have the dowels drilled in bottom connection yet, but it was done identically to top connection.