Shop-made dowels
I use a lot of 1/4" cherry, walnut, and oak dowels with my students both for joinery as well as decorative accents. Rather than purchase expensive pre-made dowels, I make my own in a two-step process. This quickly yields polished dowels that fit perfectly in their intended holes. The first step uses an annular cutter—a type of end mill (See Buyer’s Guide on page 60.) with a hole through its center. It’s this hole that sizes the dowel. The cutter I use yields a dowel just over 1/4" in diameter. Cut your dowel stock about 12" long and just under 5/16" square on the table saw and point one end in a pencil sharpener. Clamp the cutter in a vise and chuck the blank in a hand drill. Spin the blank through the cutter to rough cut the dowel to size. Measure the diameter of the resulting dowel and drill a hole 1/64" smaller through a block of hard maple. Spin the dowel through the maple block to bring it to its final diameter and polish it. It will now be a perfect match for whatever size drill bit you used to make the hole in the maple block.
