What can I use to drill dowel holes down the end of a long piece of wood?

Question

More of a DIY than Improvement question, but here goes anyway.

We're building a shoe box with slatted sides and base and were thinking of joining the slats to the corner uprights with dowel (excuse the bad art):

The problem we have is getting the dowel hole in the cross piece straight. The hole in the upright isn't a problem as we can use one of these:

(something I've wanted an excuse to buy for years!).

However, the one's we've looked at don't seem to be suitable as there's not enough clearance to insert the cross piece vertically (it's about 18"-24" long), and they don't seem to rotate on the pillar (I assume for safely reasons).

I could use a hand drill, but there'll be 4 cross pieces per side and across the base which with 2 pieces of dowel per piece per end is 160 holes - which is a lot to guarantee getting perfectly straight.

So what can I use to drill the holes in the cross pieces?

Answer 1

Buy a self centering dowel drilling jig. Lee Valley has them, as will virtually all wood working supply sources, Rockler, for example.

The jig clamps to the end of your board, and then you drill through a hardened drill guide into the board, using a hand drill. These dowel jigs used to be much more common in the days before biscuits, pocket screws, etc.

Answer 2

Maybe a 2 phase approach would work. Buying a drill press attachment for your hand drill ... much like this one and then building a jig where you could insert a dowel and attach the drill press attachment. That way you have the freedom of the hand drill and the jig will give you precision and ease of use for 160 drillings. A bit more complex than the drill press bur probably a bit cheaper. I'd wager that any drill press that has a swinging attachment would cost a pretty penny more than your average drill press.

Answer 3

Are you absolutely committed to the idea of using dowels for this? If so, in addition to a doweling jig you might want to pick up a set of transfer plugs to mark the hole locations on your upright. (You might not need these if the doweling jig can be used on a board face -- hard to tell from the photo on the Lee Valley site.)

If you have no special attachment to using dowels, the standard way of making a joint like this is to use a dado cut so the shelf is slotted into the upright:

This type of joint gives you a lot more rigidity than the dowel joint will. If you don't already have one you'll get to buy a table saw and a stacked dado head instead of the drill press, but I think a table saw is a more versatile thing to have anyway.

Answer 4

although this post was written some time ago, you could have used the wickes pillar drill by clamping your work piece upright to the edge of the swviel table to drill your dowel holes.

Answer 5

Matthias Wandel has a few tricks-of-the-trade on his website for doing this:

1) Adjust an ordinary Drill Press: place it on a workbench so it's facing away from you, then loosen the setscrews that hold the head assembly to the column and turn the whole head assembly 180 Degrees back towards you. Then pull the drill press towards you and lean it over the edge of the workbench. You can now drill pieces as long as it is far to the floor.

See: http://woodgears.ca/shop-tricks/drilling-big.html

2) Build a horizontal drilling jig.

See: http://woodgears.ca/horizontal_boring/jig.html