How do you make dowels? Or best to buy them?

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How do you do it? …if you need in various sizes and different woodstocks.

Lathe?
Steel sheet with holes? Maybe @metaltechs can advice if its possible to fabricate that with the tools we have? I’ve seen pics of a metal sheet with holes of various sizes and you hammer your wood through the holes to give you the dowel.

Or buy them? Where from? Especially different wood stocks and sizes…aside from the bog standard packs available in B&Q.

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Dowlplate

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Was just pondering the same thing myself this morning.

I’ve done the hammering technique before by drilling a wider hole in a washer - means it fits your drill bit perfectly. Professional dowel plates cut grooves for glue and stuff though. Don’t expect to get pretty looking dowels out of it - they usually come out pretty ragged and can be a bit bent if you use anything but straight grained wood. Structurally they are perfectly sound though.

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This jig is quite magic!

What length do you need?
Dowel plate useful for short pieces such as plugs and pegging joints. Brute force to through a drilled piece of metal can work but not always pretty.

I understand the that a branded plate such as lie-nielsen dowel plate are specifically shaped to allow you to sharpen them without widening the hole, but seems a bit steep!

Dowel making seems to attract many innovative solutions. Hundreds of different jigs on you tube.
I want to create quite a large dowel and i’m hoping the lathe training will give me some ideas :slight_smile:

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That’s a great jig! And liked the chisel sharpening wheel. And interesting to see he used an augur bit rather than a winged drill plate…cleaner hole?

Looks like that jig does a similar job to this one …

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Hey
I thought I would ask here 1st
So I have a project I want to do this Monday, Scaffold board bedside table, with new boards not reclaimed, and the dowel jig I have drills 10mm holes and the only rod I can find is 9mm or 12mm.
Does anyone know somewhere I can pick up some 10mm dowel rod? It needs to be rod as I want to expose the dowels.
I have found some on amazon but it won’t get to me until mid next week.