Tips & Tricks Issue 94: A Boring Dowel Trick

This article is from Issue 94 of Woodcraft Magazine.

Faced with the prospect of having to drill a 1/4"-diameter hole through the center of four dozen short lengths of 3/4"-diameter dowel, I needed to come up with a way to quickly position the pieces without having to find the center of each one. To do so, I clamped a piece of 1-1/2"-thick scrap to my drill press table, and drilled a 3/4"-diameter hole about half way through it. Then I swapped out the 3/4" bit for a 1/4" bit, and popped each of the dowels in turn into the hole for drilling. No layout was required as the hole was already perfectly centered under the bit. 

—Kelly Burns, Minneapolis, MN