Making Large Dowels WITHOUT a Lathe // Woodworking Jig // Dowel Maker

For my next project, I'm going to need some large dowels. So I experimented with some different ways to create dowels of all different sizes without having a lathe. The first method I'm going to try is the old school tried and true dowel plate. So this is just a metal plate with a series of holes of different sizes to create different sized dowels. It goes from an eighth to five eighths. So I milled up some square stock and let's see how this thing works. So it's best to clamp this down on a bench. You just have to make sure that the holes that you want to use are like over your dog holes. So in order for me to do that with this setup I have here, I just have to cut these little spacers here for these clamps and clamp it down. Now I can't just start putting this square piece through this big hole. I first just need to like chain for the ends over here. So I'm just going to use a knife and cut off all these corners and kind of make it like a pencil. Here we go. All right. So that was pretty cool. But they say to start two holes larger than the diameter that you actually need. So I'm going to pass this through two more holes and see what the results look like. That was very simple and easy to do. It's pretty cool that I can make dowels using any material that I want with just using this dowel plate. I see the only downside to it is that the biggest one that I could make is five eighths. And I'm going to need bigger than that. The next method I'm going to try is to use a round over bit at the router table. So with this method, you end up with a dowel that's double the size of the round over bit that you're using. The largest one that I have is a half-inch round over bit. So I would end up with a one-inch dowel. So I milled up a square piece of white oak to one inches square. Now let me go set up the router table. So the half-inch router bit is in the router table, and I just want to make sure that it's at the correct height. So I want this bottom piece over here to be directly in line with the bottom of the table. So if I go like that, you see that it's not, so I'm going to lower it. All right. So I think that should be good. Now I'm going to move the fence. Okay. Hopefully, this creates the one-inch dowel. Let's test it out. I'm not going to create a dowel on this whole piece. I'm going to do like a plunge cut, and then I'm going to exit so that the two ends kind of are supporting the dowel that's going to be in the middle. Now I'm just going to repeat the same process on the other three sides. That worked out better than I expected. I really thought I was going to need to play around with the settings of the bit, raise it, the fence, or something, but that is a perfectly round one-inch dowel. Could not have been easier. I guess I could have marked off my start and stopping points a little bit better. If this was a real project, I probably would have done that. This is just a test. If you are using this for a real project, you just need to make sure to cut your pieces longer than you actually need them so that you can cut off these ends over here. And I guess also the limitation here would be how long your router table actually is because you need to still have that support from the ends. So maybe if you are making something longer, you need to make some sort of jig to hold the workpiece, something that could be figured out for sure. This is only one inch because I only had a half-inch roundover bit. So let's see if I could go bigger. I have a two-inch Forstner bit here, so I think I'm going to be able to get a two-inch dowel, which I think would be pretty cool. I'm going to just mark off the center of this block here, and I'm going to get to drilling some holes. In order to get the two-inch dowels, I need to make a larger hole than two inches to be able to put in the rough stock. So I have a two-and-a-quarter-inch bit here, and I'm going to set the depth on the drill press so that it's going to drill about halfway through. Now I swapped to the two-inch bit, and I marked the center of the board on the other side, and I'm going to drill straight through. I actually don't think that there's a big enough difference between this bigger hole and the smaller hole. So what I'm going to do is use a rabbeting bit and widen the hole, and I'm just going to make sure when I'm using the bit to go the opposite way that I normally go on the router because I'm going on the inside of a hole. So now there's a bigger step between the two holes. That's actually a really great idea if you don't have any Forstner bits that are larger than the one that you want the dowel to be. You could just use a rabbeting bit and create that step. Now I'm going to mark a center mark on the bottom. That is where the router bit is going to stick up and cut the piece into a dowel. Here I have a center line on the top piece, and there I'm going to mark out for two holes where two bolts are going to go through, and it's going to attach it to the jig so that it can be replaceable, and you could switch it out for any size dowels that you need. For the hole in the bottom, I just want to make sure that it's big enough and slightly bigger than the router bit I'm going to use. And for these two holes on the top, just want to make sure that it's big enough for these bolts to go through, and I also am going to countersink them so that they're not long enough. After I'm going to have the 3 1⁄4-inch plywood under there, they're not long enough, so I'm going to need to countersink some holes so that I can get a wing nut on there and tighten them. So now I have this plywood that I'm using as the base. I'm going to find the center. Now I just need to make a recess on the other side to hold the bolts. So the wing nuts are actually a little bit hard to put on because of the clearance there. For smaller-sized dowels, this would be a smaller hole, which means this could be shorter on this jig, and wing nuts would be totally fine. So for this one, I'm actually going to swap out and use these star knobs instead. The hole that I made is wide enough to fit the star knob, so for this one, star knobs are going to be the way to go. I have this piece of ash I'm going to test on, and I just want to make sure that this piece is going to fit through the larger hole. It does not. So what I'm going to do is measure the width of the hole and then cut the stock accordingly so that the square ends will fit inside this bigger, larger hole. I put a spiral bit in the router table. Now I'm going to put the jig on, and I'm going to lower the bit so that it's in line with the smaller hole that's in the back, so the 2-inch hole. I'm just going to clamp this down to the router table, and I'm going to add some wax to the outfeed hole so that it's going to come out a little smoother. So that totally worked. I have a 2-inch dowel. It needs a little bit of cleanup work and maybe some adjustments with the jig, but overall, the idea works. This piece was actually slightly thinner than 2 inches when I first started, so there's some two flat spots right here, but I knew that going into it, and this was just a scrap piece of ash that I just wanted to test on, and I did not want to cut up anything bigger. Just maybe needs a little bit of sanding, a little bit of tweaking, adjusting with the jig, but the idea works. I totally want to figure out a different way to mount it to a drill because this wastes a lot of the wood, and also, it didn't feel so strong. This is the biggest one that I had. Maybe if I just figure out a different way to hold it in there, that would be a little bit better, but super, super cool. Now, I just want to try one more method, an old-school way with just using a hole and a chisel, and now that's what I wanted. I want a little opening on top so that I could lay a chisel on top, and it will slice into the wood and turn it into a dowel, hopefully. Before I can put a piece of wood into here, I just need to shave off the ends, just like a pencil, so that it will go into the hole. I actually ended up doing that with a belt sander. It was a lot easier. Now, it's going to fit into the chamber on the hole here, and now I just need to clamp everything down to my workbench with the chisels slightly skewed into the opening on top of the hole. I decided to knock off the corners just to make it easier, figuring I want to get as close to the final diameter as possible. Nope, I did not like doing that. Maybe if I figured out a way to hold the chisel in the correct position, that would be better. The chisel was moving on me. It did not feel safe at all. The clamp was definitely not enough, and the results are also pretty poor. There's a ton of chip-out and tear-out, but it could be because this is ash, and it's a very open, prone-to-chip-out-and-tear-out kind of wood. I just didn't have anything, something like maple, that was this thick to try to test it on. And I am not going to glue up some maple right now to test this on this, because I just did not like doing this method at all. I want to use my drill to be able to sand the dowel, so I just put a rope through my bench that's tied at the bottom. And then when I press on it with my foot, it pulls the trigger. All sanded. Now let me take a moment to talk about this week's sponsor. I love doing experiments like this because this is how I learned to become a better woodworker. And I really enjoy to learn new concepts and ideas, and that's why I use Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes covering a wide array of topics. You can learn about photography, creative writing, web development, fine arts, and much, much more. There's a class for everyone. With a premium membership, you can take an unlimited amount of classes from experts in their field. I know nothing about graphic design, so I decided to take a class on logo design. I had no idea there was something called gridding when it comes to designing logos, so I may sit down and do a revamp of my logo using what I learned in these awesome videos. Skillshare is simple to use and it's really affordable. An annual premium subscription is just less than $10 a month, but if you click the link in the description down below, you can get a two-month free trial to Skillshare Premium. So click down that link and you can get to learning. So thank you guys so much for sponsoring this video. Now let's see which methods I preferred best to make these dowels. The dowel plate is really awesome to use for small size dowels. It's pretty awesome that I could make dowels from any species of wood and I could make it to match my project or maybe use it as a contrasting accent for my projects. So really happy to have this now for smaller size dowels. It is best to use straight grain though. This wood was not straight, so it is a little bendy. So that's just something to be aware of. And also the size limitation. It could only go up to five-eighths. So then the next method that I tried was the half-inch roundover router bit. This was super fast, super easy. Definitely really love this method. For longer pieces though, I would have to figure out some sort of holding jig. Maybe just like a longer piece that had two clamps on the ends that can hold the workpiece in place while I route out the middle or something like that. But this was the fastest and easiest for sure. The next method was the jig that went on the router table that had the two size holes. I did two here. Here was the ash and here is the walnut. It worked, but there was a lot of sanding that I had to do afterwards. Maybe if I play around with it a little bit more, adjust the settings, maybe use a different bit, then maybe I can get it to be perfect. But it was not perfect. It was okay. I got a really good end result after a lot of sanding. But it was not as clean as using the roundover bit. Now the last way, the old school chisel way, did not like this at all. I've seen a ton of videos where it works really well for a lot of people and they're just like zip it through and it totally works. It did not work for me. Maybe it was the wood choice. Maybe it was the angle of the chisel, the size of the holes. I don't know what it was. It just didn't really work for me. I've seen it work for other people, so I know that it can work. I'm just not going to invest any more time in trying to figure it out because I did not like this method the best. I think my conclusion is that I'm going to get a bigger roundover bit so that I can make larger dowels using that method. So if I want a 2-inch dowel, I'm going to need to get a 1-inch roundover bit. I don't have one of those, but now that I know that I am going to need that if I want to make 2-inch dowels, that's what I'm going to do. So thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you guys, I guess, when I finish up this project that involves all these dowels. All right. Thanks. Bye. It's less than $10 a month, except if you link the click. Do you link the click in the description?