BIG IMPROVEMENT To The DIY Dowel Jig and How To Make One

dowels are an incredibly easy method of joinery and it surprised me when i learned that in some tests they're actually shown to be stronger than dominoes and the traditional mortise and tenon my fellow crafts rights you'll be happy to know that you don't have to break the bank on an expensive dowling jig to make high quality dowel joints in fact you can make a very versatile and accurate diy jig just like this one but cody why are there so many holes it's a good question and i'll show you why but first let me show you how to make one the build starts by ripping a strip of 5 8 inch or 15 millimeter baltic birch at the table saw a little wider than needed before slowly sneaking up to the final width which i checked with a set of digital calipers i'm looking for a variation tolerance of about five thousandths of an inch or so i prefer my crosscut sled when making small project parts i find it safer and more accurate than a miter saw so after squaring the top of the workpiece i place it against the stop clamp it down and make the cut for the head of the jig then re-measure and cut the pieces for the sliding dovetail and handle the next step of gluing the head to the body is pretty self-explanatory so i'm gonna hush up for a second because i really want you to hear how cool this glue application sounds that was it the little swoosh swoosh i just thought that was really neat now while that's drying i cut the 10 degree sliding dovetail for the fence system at the table saw again sneaking up to the final dimensions [Music] excess glue on the head and handle assembly is cleaned up with a chisel before it has a chance to fully set with the pieces for the handle cut i can mark their location mask off where the glue will go and then apply a liberal amount of paste wax to the moving parts of the handle this helps make sure the glue doesn't stick to them freezing up their movement i apply glue to the parts making sure to leave about a sixteenth of an inch with no glue on the edges closest to the sliding center section ca glue makes holding the side pieces in place laterally a breeze until i have a chance to put downward pressure on them with clamps the other side is assembled in the same way making sure there's adequate pressure on the joint especially since the paste wax will have swollen the wood fibers up a bit if your joint feels too tight don't worry it'll more than likely loosen up as the soaked fibers calm down if not you can always lightly sand the center sliding section the sides are cleaned up with a chisel and plane before i trim the excess stock from the head with the crosscut sled still on the table saw i'll make some scrap wood spacers making sure that they are as close to identical to each other and along their length as possible the first one was a little proud so i ended up using a playing card to push the stock over and make it just a little bit thinner after marking a center line and adjusting my depth on the drill press table i used a scrap offcut that is precisely the same width as the doweling jig to make sure that i'm perfectly centered despite all my precise measuring i still wasn't centered so i adjusted using paper shims until the hole matched up when i flipped the scrap over this is critical to the build now onto the drilling i use handy shims to offset the jig from the fence and drill the tip of the alignment slot then drill the center hole to drill the holes on either side of the center line i use the spacers i made at the table saw to offset one side stop block move the work piece up against the stop drill the hole then flip and repeat the spacers also come in handy to move the holes further away from the fence and closer to the tip of the jig setup blocks or gauges could also do the trick but i don't have any and i feel like that's not a common thing in most shops i chose this method over gluing a pattern to the plywood because by drilling the holes this way even if i'm a little bit off which is inevitable with a pattern the holes will still be perfectly symmetrical to each other in reference to the jig's sides which will negate any error and also allow me to flip the jig over which you'll see why that's important at the end after that i double up the spacers through the next roll of holes until all 13 pilot holes are drilled don't worry this is all very well documented in the available plans if you want to make this jig yourself to finish the holes i drill from both sides of the forstner bit meeting in the middle i opted for this route instead of the normal drill with the forstner bit until the tip just starts to poke out and then flip it over and use that as your pilot hole because i found on version number four that by doing that you're pressing the fibers out with the forstner bit so when you finish the holes because they're so close together it just makes for massive blowout hence the 1 8 inch pilot holes last thing of the drill press is to drill stopped holes for the centering pins the final hole for the alignment slot and the radius corners for where the handle meets the head at the bandsaw i snuck up on the alignment slot flipping the workpiece to keep it centered until a 3 8 inch dowel just fit without slop and without being too tight then i could remove the waste from the sides and reveal the handle for guide bushings i found simple seamless steel spacers worked just fine for a jig like this the back end of a forstner bit makes a really good burnishing tool and it also helps push in the masking tape so cutting it with an x-acto knife is a breeze so after masking everything off i made sure to clean them well with alcohol and then epoxy them in place [Music] i made my centering guide pins from steel dowel using a redneck lathe and a dremel but you could also use wooden dowels no problem in fact that might be a better route because if they ever get out of whack you could simply flush cut redrill and install new ones the pins are also epoxied in place and i double check that they're square before the epoxy kicks for a fence i opted to use two inch aluminum angle that i cut to length of the table saw making sure to let the blade stop before removing the offcut talk about kickback from hell if you don't do that then used poor man's dikem to mark where the screw holes will go these get drilled and countersunk and i finally trim off the excess from the handle with a handsaw after making a baseline mark for alignment and double checking that everything is square and equidistant i clamp the fence to the jig and drill two pilot holes with a self-centering drill bit with that done i can use a pencil to trace the outline of the jig and shape the fence to match using a drill and hacksaw any sharp aluminum edges are cleaned up with a file and duct tape backed sandpaper which by the way is amazing big ups to alex steele and will stelter for that tip the fence is then screwed and ca glued in place to the center sliding dovetail we're almost there folks back at the drill press i drill a 25 64 inch hole for a threaded insert before sanding and finishing with osmo pollocks after that's had time to dry i installed the insert and put a self-adhesive pad to the thumb screw so it doesn't mar the inside of the jig and lastly just when i thought i was done i had one design change come to mind to drill two holes into the fence i'll show you what those are for in a minute all right now that it's done we can actually talk about how it works and answer the question of why so many holes cody so its most basic function is with these two pins here being a self-centering drill guide these guys twist lock up you drill a centered hole that comes in really handy if you're wanting to join say two pieces of wood together like these in a panel and the most basic version the one that you everybody's been showing on the internet you just drill a random set of holes line them up use this alignment slot and then drill the other holes to match but with this one you can get a little fancier i'll show you the the basic version and then i'll show you the fancy stuff you line these puppies up pop a dowel in here get your depth with your fence and then you just use that alignment slot so your two holes align i'm not going to put these all the way together because these are tight dowels and if i did that i probably wouldn't get this apart so that's your basic function let's say you wanted to join this panel together in a very specific way with very specific hole placement let's say you and you wanted to do multiple dials let's say you wanted to do a dowel here and a dowel here so we're going to put a line there and we're going to do the same thing here i'm going to run these marks across so this is almost going to be like a domino let's say i wanted to do two dowels i'm going to pop that on there center this up and now i can use this and a clamp i align the jig to the mark that i made then i can just pop in two holes move it down the next mark and then you get the matching holes all i have to do is flip the jig around and because when this was made everything was concentric concentric concentric is that the right word everything is centered off of the sides i can just line that up oh my as well then these go together like so these lines are perfectly aligned this is totally flush smooth and much stronger than just doing random single dowels you can do double dowels you can do triple dowels you can even use these two put two in drill two i mean drill two set these two over the dial drill two drill two drill two and you can have evenly spaced on the way down your panel so the next joint to demonstrate is going to be a basic 90 degree butt joint i'm going to start with this one for this joint i want to do three holes and three holes with nothing in the middle so i'm gonna start just by using the standard centering feature then i'll take a dowel pop it in one set this over it and set my fence clamp it in place and drill the other two holes and my dip stop fell off so this part we line up we already have the depth set here so i'm just making sure that this isn't going to interfere with this edge because the fence is what's keeping us where we need to be this way now this is the problem that i was that actually made me design this with the standard ones that you've seen on youtube uh jsk kubu if that's how his channel is pronounced i hope i got that right and 3x3 both have great videos on these and these are nifty little jigs and this is the basis for my idea but the problem with this one is if you wanted to do multiple holes like here you would have to drill your hole pull the dial out put it in the other one drill your hole pull that dowel out put it in here drill your other one with dowels like this when you can stack them really close together that's when you get really good strength and this was a big downfall to this i thought but with this one because these are all the same all you have to do is line up that center hole and i need to adjust my depth stop again real quick and if you're wondering why i'm using a standard twist drill bit it's actually from harbor freight i bought four different 3 8 inch bits including one by fish or fisher whichever one it is i can't remember high quality brad point wood bits and not a single one of them would drill a 3 8 inch hole every one of them would drill a hole at least a 64th sometimes actually a 30 second sometimes a 16th larger than what it needs to be and with dowels you want them to be tight you don't want to have to hit them home with a sledgehammer but you definitely want to have to tap them home and i was getting holes so loose that they would just wiggle about in themselves now i just line that up bad board no they're good all right moment of truth didn't need to use a hammer just my hand pressure and that is a perfectly flush square 90 degree joint very strong too now let's say i wanted to take this piece and put it in the middle of this board the t-joint if you will i can mark where i want the board to go and then because i know the exact specific distance between here and here i can measure and mark another line i'll take this board and line it up on that line and i'll actually take the fence off because again this is a specific distance from here all i have to do is line that up gunk out of there ta-da there you go 90 degree joint super strong this is a really strong joint and you don't have to do threes you could even if you had a thicker piece of wood let's say you were doing doubled up three quarter inch the set of four actually fits over it perfectly so then you could put these in and have very strong joints one thing i did promise to show you is what these two extra holes here were for in the fence that i thought of last minute and that's to add an auxiliary spacer pushes this thing out so how would that be used and why let's say we want to attach this here put a mark pop this in the vise line this edge up with the bottom edge of the piece set these holes where i think they should go move my fence in square it up clamp it in place for the mating piece this goes there this gets lined up on that mark we made over here drill the holes and my battery died oh man this one's only got two bars pray for me [Applause] so i rushed a little bit i'll be honest and because i rushed a little bit we're about a 30 second away from flush and about a 16th away from the mark down here but overall i think you get the gist so i hope that made sense why i made all these holes why i made it the way that i did obviously if you had a cnc this would be a lot easier and hell if you had a cnc and you did this out of aluminum the thing would outlast you if you end up making one of these please let me know what you think about it and if you come up with some different uses than what i explained here for all these different hole patterns i'd love to hear it plans for this are available on my website and with that being said keep up the good work you

Channel: Craftswright

Views: 417,280

Keywords: best doweling jig, best doweling jig kit, doweling jig diy, adjustable doweling jig, diy doweling jig, dowelmax doweling jig, how to make doweling jig, jessem doweling jig, jessem doweling jig vs dowelmax, make a simple doweling jig, make doweling jig, best diy dowel jig, best dowel jig, 3x3 custom dowel jig, adjustable dowel jig, centering dowel jig, diy dowel jig plans, dowel joinery jig, dowel joint jig, easy dowel jig, how to make a dowel jig, jsk koubou dowel jig

Id: 6_c8Y4GPWgI

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Justin435]

Are you the guy who posted to r/woodworking about making one of these?

[u/slow_rizer]

Awesome!