Mr_Grimsdale":227bveao said:
Dowels OK if you are not bothered how long the doors last - and if you have various expensive bits of dowel kit, as they are not as easy to do as they look.
Dowelling kit isn't necessarily expensive - the Marples/Record M148 dowelling jig wasn't overpriced, works very well and costs a lot less than a mortiser. Yes, I know I can cut M&Ts by hand, but I find a machine does that better and faster than I can any day if there are multiples to be done and for multiples with a decent jig dowelling is faster still. It all depends on what you have to hand by way of kit, I suppose. Whilst I know that a M&T will generally be stronger that a dowel joint the dowel if properly glued and cramped can still be a very durable joint. Personally I rather like using stub tenons strengthened with a couple of dowels on doors (Frankenstein joint, but good for painted MDF doors) or sometimes loose stub tenons (i.e. a mortise cut in both pieces to the joint and a loose tenon piece glued in) as a solution on smaller doors, especially kitchen ones which probably won't have above a 20 year lifespan. I wouldn't, however, use dowels or stub tenons on a full-size door.
Mr_Grimsdale":227bveao said:
Strictly speaking dowels are only used for industrially made cheap furniture and are best avoided altogether by DIYers esp if bothered about quality of work. Never used in traditional work except as pins through M&Ts.
Aren't chairs full of dowels? Like Colin I've used dowels on repair work, although the volume I've done is paltry. I'm just repairing what I'm told is a late Victorian/Edwardian rocker at the moment and the thing has been bodged that many times that the
only solution is to use dowels. Machine dowelling had come in by the time of the 1851 Great Exhibition and was apparently reasonably common in even smaller workshops in the East End by 1900, perhaps as a cross-over from chair-making. But in modern solid wood work such as Scandiniavian style (i.e. 1960s retro style) furniture the
only way to put pieces together is often to dowel them as there is no frame and panel to work with, just solid teak or mahogany. Still that's probably what you'd call modern tat! :wink:
On a more serious note surely the reason why dowelling is a more modern contrivance is because the first truly accurate auger bits (Jennings-pattern bits) only came about in the 1870s (maybe Alf or Bugbear could correct me on that)?
the_g_ster":227bveao said:
Mr G, have you seen how fast it is to put something together with pocket hole kits?
The problem with pocket hole stuff is that the joints are marginal on larger cabinets like full-height oven cabs and if the assembler makes a muck of it and overtightens the screws even a little the resulting cracks can start the joint on the rapid road to premature failure. I much prefer even carcass screws (horrid things) to that! Pocket holes can also fail if the cab is subjected to rough handling in transit, especially racking movement. Bear in mind here that I am talking about MFC kitchen carcasses and not plywood - they work much better on plywood, but are a disaster on MDF, IMHO. I think one of the primary objections I have to using pocket holes on doors though (or anywhere else where they will be visible) is the aesthetics of them - to me they just make doors look cheap and tacky even with the shaped plug fillers Kreg sell
Scrit
.
