Cutting slits in dowels
When joining pieces with dowels, its good to have enough glue. But if the dowel fits the hole very well, sometimes its impossible for the excess glue to get out, which makes it very difficult to insert the dowel all the way.A solution is to cut a slit in the dowel, but that can be time consuming to do if you have a lot of dowels that need slitting.
A solution is to make a very simple jig for slitting them on the band saw. Just drill a
series of holes the size of the dowel along the edge of a thick piece of lumber. Drill
these holes most of the way, but not all of the way through. The holes should be at least
half as deep as the length of the dowels you need to slit.
Then, put dowels in the hole, and cut just partly into each dowel with the band saw.
Next, take the dowels out, put in another set of dowels, and repeat. The time spent doing this
for each dowel ends up being quite short. And when you are done, just toss the jig into
the scrap wood pile - its not like it took any significant amount of time to make it.
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