1/8" maple dowels

[NNNN]

Many google searches for 1/8" maple dowels lead back to TB or other guitar forums where people ask about and then lament the lack of sources for small diameter maple dowels. But I did find an ancient post about making a plug cutter out of a short length of 1/8" ID tubing. Happy to report that it works relatively well. There's probably room for improvement, but I got what I needed.

 

[Matt Liebenau]

Hope the hammer was to seat the plugs in the headstock and not for the cutter. Another option is to get a bigger dowel or even a square piece of wood and drill an 1/8” hole in a piece of steel and then you can use the hammer and tap the wood through the plate and presto! 1/8” dowel. Note: if the starting piece is significantly bigger then 1/8” start with larger holes and step down until you get to 1/8”.

 

[rudy4444]

Pick yourself up a Lie-Neilsen dowel plate to inset into your bench top and you'll be able to produce all the common dowel sizes in any type of wood quickly and easily.

Veritas and other manufacturers make products to create dowels with.

 

[Max Bogosity]

The dowels are great, but I just learned that a rawhide mallet is a thing that exists and I'm amazed.

 

[T_Bone_TL]

Plugs are better than dowels where the grain agrees. Of course you can use a plug-cutter long-ways to make short dowels, but having a plug-cutter, you can aslo make proper plugs so the grain lines up and seasonal movement is less likely to tear things apart.

 

[NNNN]

Hope the hammer was to seat the plugs in the headstock and not for the cutter.

The hammer is to play the bass with when it's finished.

Pick yourself up a Lie-Neilsen dowel plate

That's a pretty neat tool.

Plugs are better than dowels.

Definitely. For me, 1/8" proved too small a diameter to make plugs longer than 1/4". They just kept breaking. For shallow holes it would have been fine. Stewmac appears to be the only place to get a 3/16" plug cutter, but it's $70 to my door and I'd obviously have to widen the holes to 3/16", which I thought might look more conspicuous.

 

[rudy4444]

The dowels are great, but I just learned that a rawhide mallet is a thing that exists and I'm amazed.

I have a shop dog so a rawhide mallet isn't in my future.

 

[Bruce Johnson]

I buy and use 1/8" birch dowels for a lot of things, mostly as actual dowels; hidden pins to align things. For plugging holes in a visible surface, I prefer to cut my own cross-grain plugs from matching wood.

Plug cutters are real easy to make from a piece of tubing, hand filing some teeth on the end of it. I have a machine shop here, so I make up core drills, which are a nicer version of the same idea:

I made these for cutting dots from synthetic pearl stock, but they work fine for wood too. These are turned in a metal lathe, from round steel or stainless bar stock. The ID is bored to exactly the diameter of the dot I need. The OD at the end is turned down to make the cutter thin wall. The inside of the shank is drilled hollow, a little larger than the dot diameter. That way, the dots will stack up neatly inside the bit, and can be easily dumped out the back end. The teeth are hand cut with a file.

You can make up plug cutters similar to this from steel tubing, filing the teeth by hand.

For larger diameter plugs, I use a router lathe setup. I mounted a RotoZip electric cutter head to the tool post of an older backup metal lathe. With this, I can make plugs and dowels to precise diameters, any wood, any grain orientation. I run the lathe spindle fairly slow, like 180 rpm. Most of the cutting is done by the router bit at speed in the RotoZip head. It leaves a very smooth surface.

You can make a setup like this, mounting a small router head, or even a Dremel, onto a small cheap wood lathe. Turn the spindle slowly by hand and bring the spinning cutter against it.

 

[rudy4444]

Here's a good video demonstrating using one of the popular dowel plates currently available on Amazon: