Dowelled mortise and tenon

[Chris_belgium]

I want to make some dowelled mortise and tenon joints in some rather big pieces of wood. The wood will be Aphselia Doussie beams sized 80mm by 150mm. This is for a garden gate project.

I would like to make the dowels also out of aphselia. How can these dowels be made. I have seen the lie nielsen doweling plates but those are rather expensive. Is there another cheaper way of doing this?

Another question wich i have is, do dowelled mortise and tenon joints still need to be glued?

thanks for your time.

 

[Colin C]

You can make your own dowel plate if you have a drill press or some thing to drill the holes in a plate.
Try to get some steel a (4-6mm ), if you can get some and drill some holes in it but you have to try and make the steps between them as small as possible.

If you dont need to do this much, then drill the size you what and drill some bigger holes as well ( about 6 steps up from the size you need so when you make your dowel, cut it to close the size of your largest hole and work down,
this way you should get a dowel you can use for what you need.
Ps My dowel plate go's from 1/2 - 1/6 in 64th steps

 

[Bean]

As an alternative I use steel nuts,
1. drill the treadout to whatever size you need
2. File slots in the end face of the nut.
3. Cut your wood so that the square is slightly oversize.
4. Taper one end so that it fits in the nut from the end where the slots are.
5. round the other end off so that it fits in a mains drill.
6. clamp the nut in a strong vice.
7. run the drill up to a suitable speed (you will feel when it is ok)
8. push the wood trough the nut.

Out of the other side will be a beautiful round dowel
sounds a bit longwinded but makes dowels very easily and I think better than hammering through a plate