Dowel joint - whom uses them?

[Mr T]

Hi

I'm writing a beginners guide to woodwork and I've got to the chapter on jointing. Space is limited so I'm having to leave some joints out.
Difficult choice! I haven't done a dowel joint in years so I thought I might leave that out, but then I have a domino which beginners won't have.
I just wondered how much other's use dowel joints.

Thinking about it, I would guess that most of us use a fairly limited range of joints most of the time.

Chris

 

[mseries]

Not for a long long time. I try to avoid them to be honest. I was less experienced when I last did one, but still past beginner stage.

 

[RobinBHM]

Biscuit jointers can be under £100 and may well be bought by beginners. its an easy joint for a beginner to have success with.

I think a dowel joint is a poor option in many instances and would be a very difficult joint for a beginner to achieve the accuracy needed. I know dowel jigs are available but decent jigs soon approach a similar price to a biscuit jointer.

Face frames for kitchen etc can be assembled easily with screws (and then plugged or 2 packed) or pocket hole screws.

I use confirmat screws for carcases, just clamp the carcase together and screw through both with the special stepped drill bit.

 

[marcros]

i don't use it, although I do like the Miller Dowels and have used them on some projects.

standard dowels do offer the advantage to a beginner of needing no equipment other than a drill, minimal outlay for a length of dowel, can look attractive and yet remain simple. you could argue that a wedged through tenon is low cost, but it certainly requires more skill. There may be some justification for including it for those reasons- the absolute beginner almost certainly won't have a biscuit jointer (or router and cutter), a domino or a pocket screw jig.

 

[AJB Temple]

I occasionally use dowels: I used some yesterday in fact to repair some cornicing. I think omitting them from a beginners guide is probably unwise. You only need a brief section and suggest that they are now out of fashion being difficult to line up accurately without a jog and largely replaced by biscuit joints or self assembly mechanisms.

It is perhaps worth remembering that a dowel is in many ways just a fancy form of a peg, still used extensively in timber framing to bring joints together and hold timbers in place. I still use driven pegs.

 

[dzj]

Not that often any more.
I use a slot mortiser for boring without which it would be pretty messy.
Mostly I use them as indexing pins, be it for glue ups or combined with fasteners.
+1 for confirmat screws.

 

[Woody2Shoes]

As a (self-assessed!) intermediate-level amateur woodworker, my 2d's worth:

- I don't use dowels to make joints - as has been said, they can be fiddly to align, sometimes even with a jig. Poor choice of correctly sized, off-the-shelf dowels in the right timber is also a reason for not using them. I do use beechwood biscuits (with a suitable 4mm slot cutter on a router).

- I enjoy using home-made dowels (made with a dowel plate, sometimes in contrasting timbers) to draw-bore m/t joints or to strengthen other weaker joints (either on a large-scale - e.g. 19mm on green oak roof - or on a small-scale - e.g. 3mm on an oak picture frame).

Cheers, W2S

 

[custard]

Industry uses them all the time (but I guess you know that) most of the big Italian chair manufacturers secure all the seat rails with two 10 or 12mm dowels, good for thirty years after which the glue fails and they fall apart!

I use dowels regularly. Little 4 or 5mm dowels as supplements to the main tenons where I'm trying to get a little extra purchase to prevent a glue line opening up (think of the side and front rails on a chair, there's usually a large, deep rebate to take an upholstered slip seat, the tenon sits below the rebate, but a tiny dowel alongside the rebate is a nice touch to help keep the glue line invisible). And in cab construction, where you have a T-shaped join between two solid components, a row of dowels can be a very useful jointing technique, which is why Krenov used them so much, obviously a row of Dominos or biscuits would give even less long grain adhesion in this case so dowels are probably the best of a bad bunch.

The final place I'll use dowels is again on chairs, often you're fighting for jointing space on the back legs, you want to give priority to the side rail to back leg joint as that's where the biggest stresses occur, so it sometimes make sense to joint the back rail with a big thick stub tenon (only say 3 or 4mm long) but supplemented with a few 8mm dowels. I make a jig from a stable block of oak or beech, with the stub tenon on one side and the shallow mortice accurately aligned on the other side, with the dowel holes drilled right through you can get perfectly aligned joint. It won't last forever, but you'll get at least one set of eight or ten chairs out of it and it only takes an hour to knock up a replacement.

I know dowels have a bad reputation, but they definitely still have a place in quality furniture making, and for the beginner they offer a cheaper route into "automated" jointing than anything else.

Good luck with the book!

 

[Jacob]

Use dowels as pins through M&Ts.
Sometimes draw-bored where it helps e.g. stair string to newel post. NB they do not strengthen a joint, they are to help pull it together where cramps are not an easy option.
But not as a joint in itself - though I think they come in for attaching funny shapes, decorative details such as brackets in cabriole legs.

 

[Woody2Shoes]

Hi Jacob - dowels definitely strengthened the mitred butt joints on my picture frame (apart from the glued end-grain there was nothing else to hold the corners together besides my little wooden "nails"!) e.g. using dowels instead of nails like this: http://www.ripsdiy.co.za/graphics/woodnailingmitre.jpg . I'm sure there are other types of joint that can be usefully and attractively strengthened by dowels, but I take your point that drawbored joints are just made tighter and arguably more durable, rather than strengthened, by dowels - cheers, W2S

 

[AndyT]

Not so fast! Don't dismiss dowels!

I was a hard-up beginner for years and used dowels a lot.

I made large cupboards in a basement alcove, using 2x1 PAR and plywood for the doors, with an applied moulding. The planing may be a bit suspect, but the corner joints are sound.

Using dowels for the corners was quick and easy compared to lots of hand-cut mortices in softwood. No way would I have spent £100 on a biscuit jointer!

In that sort of light-weight construction, where much of the strength comes from gluing all round the plywood panels, dowels were ideal. They also saved a few metres of material, as I didn't need to add on length for tenons or leave horns to cut mortices.

I also made a few wall cupboards from veneered boards. My dowelling jig was this one - no name - chosen because it was the only one in the toolshop where I bought it in the 80s, used with a few dowel points and some careful marking out.

Later, I made a dowel drilling attachment for my lathe, following a design in a magazine article by Robert Wearing. I used it to make these wardrobe doors,

and the face frame on this bookcase.

So, in my experience, dowels are a good way to get on and build stuff. None of the joints has ever come apart.

Of course, that was all before I had the internet to help me! :wink:

 

[Wildman]

still use them for making field gates and windows when needed. They are also a quick way to build book cases with my home made jig.

 

[Jacob]

Hi Jacob - dowels definitely strengthened the mitred butt joints on my picture frame (apart from the glued end-grain there was nothing else to hold the corners together besides my little wooden "nails"!) e.g. using dowels instead of nails like this: http://www.ripsdiy.co.za/graphics/woodnailingmitre.jpg . I'm sure there are other types of joint that can be usefully and attractively strengthened by dowels, but I take your point that drawbored joints are just made tighter and arguably more durable, rather than strengthened, by dowels - cheers, W2S

No I meant draw-boring itself doesn't strengthen a M&T joint - it's just a way of pinning them up tighter.

 

[Paul Chapman]

Of all the various jointing methods, I rate dowels as the worst option. Dowelling provides very little long grain to long grain gluing surface. In addition, unless you have a very good dowelling jig (which many beginners will not have) it's not that easy to drill accurate holes for the dowels.

I still use dowels occasionally but not for jointing.

Cheers :wink:

Paul

 

[Woodchips2]

I've used a Joint Genie dowel jig http://www.joint-genie.com/shop/index.p ... ommon/home for a few years for making furniture, partitions, studwork etc and found it quick and easy and very accurate. It isn't cheap to buy but it is a quality bit of kit. You need to get your matching faces square for a good joint but this isn't difficult with a shooting board and a sharp plane.

There are tests on the web such as this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lES-zekLhqU where dowel joints come out well compared to mortice and tenon or biscuit joints.

Regards Keith

 

[Alder]

I have used dowels on occasion. I cannot comment on their relative strength as compared to other options. Lining two pieces of timber correctly with only dowel pins for alignment is quite a skill builder..
Russell

 

[mumble]

I have used dowels for a few projects. I have been quite pleased with the results once I purchased one of these:
wolfecraft Dowel master for under £20

Didn't have the same success just using the dowel centre points

 

[Mr T]

Hi

Thanks for the responses, the consensus seems to be that they are falling out of favour with a few exceptions.

I used to use dowels quite a lot, making up wooden jigs as needed. For the book we have a self imposed limit of no machines, we are having power tools but not floor standing machines. For drilling wooden dowel jigs the holes need to be dead square, difficult without a good drill press. I may include a brief description of a simple shop bought jig.

BY the way I'm not sure where the "whom " came from!

Chris

 

[custard]

Best of luck with the book. I'll probably not be buying that particular volume, but if you were ever to write a sequel about the lovely Malmsten chair you made then I'd be camped outside Waterstones on the publication date!

 

[mumble]

I suspect the reason why people on this forum don't use dowels is that they have "moved on" from them. But they are for a beginner like myself, a cheap and easy way of joining wood. So for that reason I would include them.