Quarter-inch dowel pin alignment took me 6 hours, jig or no jig?

Got a job last Tuesday building 14 shaker-style cabinet doors for a kitchen in Nashville, and I decided to switch from loose tenons to dowel pins for the rails and stiles. Sounded simple enough, but after three failed dry fits where everything racked and the corners didn't line up within a 32nd, I spent two full evenings just tweaking my drill guide setup. The dowel centers I had kept slipping on the second hole, so I ended up clamping a scrap fence and re-drilling every single joint, which blew my whole schedule. Now I'm wondering if I'm just doing it wrong or if a dedicated multi-spindle machine is the only real answer for production work. Those of you who use dowels daily, how long did it take you to get consistent repeatable joints, and what was the fix that finally clicked for you?

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tylerw923d ago

A multi-spindle machine isn't really the answer here, that's just throwing money at a setup problem you can fix for free. Your real issue is the drill guide, not the dowels.

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