I recently was putting together a plywood case and wanted to put a couple of dowels at each joint for alignment. I have a commercial dowel jig but it only allows one hole to be drilled before I have to move it.
I made up a quick plywood jig to drill out multiple holes for 8mm dowels at one go.
B&Q sell 10mm external diameter mild steel pipe, nominal 1mm thickness. The internal diameter is just a shade less than 8mm.
I used a drill press to make some right angle 10mm holes in the plywood, cut a few lengths of pipe (after boring it out to 8mm) as sleeving and just pressed these in with a little glue to hold them in place. Another piece of plywood is used as a fence.
I just align against one of my parts to be jointed using one face of the jig and then flip the jig over and use the opposite side of the jig when marking the other part.
As long as the plywood has one straight square edge and the holes are drilled square on the drill press then the holes will align.
Placing the centre of the 10mm holes approx 9mm in from the edge roughly centres the dowel in 18mm stock and allows clearance for a stop collar on an 8mm drill.
Pictures tell a better story.
http://193.61.130.207/imagetest/0288.jpg is a picture of the completed jig
http://193.61.130.207/imagetest/0287.jpg is a picture of the pipe being drilled out to 8mm
http://193.61.130.207/imagetest/0289.jpg is a picture of the A side of the jig being used
http://193.61.130.207/imagetest/0290.jpg then the B side
http://193.61.130.207/imagetest/0291.jpg shows the two components
http://193.61.130.207/imagetest/0297.jpg is a (poor) picture showing one of the sleeves half inserted
http://193.61.130.207/imagetest/0292.jpg is a picture of my commercial jig
These pictures are not on a public server and will only be available for a short time.
What’s the best way to put pictures on this site?