A dowel is a cylindrical rod, usually made of

wood Wood is a porous and fibrous structural tissue found in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants. It is an organic materiala natural composite of cellulose fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a matrix of lignin ...

plastic Plastics are a wide range of synthetic or semi-synthetic materials that use polymers as a main ingredient. Their plasticity makes it possible for plastics to be moulded, extruded or pressed into solid objects of various shapes. This adapta ...

, or

metal A metal (from ancient Greek, Greek μέταλλον ''métallon'', "mine, quarry, metal") is a material that, when freshly prepared, polished, or fractured, shows a lustrous appearance, and conducts electrical resistivity and conductivity, e ...

. In its original manufactured form, a dowel is called a ''dowel rod''. Dowel rods are often cut into short lengths called dowel pins. Dowels are commonly used as structural reinforcements in cabinet making and in numerous other applications, including: * Furniture shelf supports * Moveable game pieces (i.e. pegs) * Hangers for items such as clothing, key rings, and tools * Wheel axles in toys * Detents in gymnastics grips * Supports for tiered wedding cakes

Wood dowel

Manufacturing process

The traditional tool for making dowels is a ''dowel plate'', an iron (or better, hardened tool steel) plate with a hole having the size of the desired dowel. To make a dowel, a piece of wood is split or whittled to a size slightly bigger than desired and then driven through the hole in the dowel plate. The sharp edges of the hole shear off the excess wood.Ivin Sickels
Exercises in Wood-Working
American Book Company, 1889; see Exercise 18.— Uniting with Dowels, pages 104-105.Dowel Making and Doweling
Scientific American
Vol. XLIX, No. 6 (Aug. 11, 1883); page 88.H. H. Parker, Making Wood Dowels
Popular Mechanics
Vol. 41, No. 6 (June, 1924); page 957. A second approach to cutting dowels is to rotate a piece of oversized stock past a fixed knife, or alternatively, to rotate the knife around the stock. Machines based on this principle emerged in the 19th century. Frequently, these are small bench-mounted tools. For modest

manufacturing Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to ...

volumes, wood dowels are typically manufactured on industrial dowel machines based on the same principles as the rotary cutters described above. Such machines may employ interchangeable cutting heads of varying

diameter In geometry, a diameter of a circle is any straight line segment that passes through the center of the circle and whose endpoints lie on the circle. It can also be defined as the longest chord of the circle. Both definitions are also valid f ...

s, thus enabling the machines to be quickly changed to manufacture different dowel diameters. Typically, the mechanism is open-ended, with material guides at the machine's entry and exit to enable fabrication of continuous dowel rods of unlimited length. Since the 19th century, some of these dowel machines have had power feed mechanisms to move the stock past the cutting mechanism.

Application

When dowels are glued into blind holes, a very common case in dowel-based joinery, there must be a path for air and excess glue to escape when the dowel is pressed into place. If no provision is made to relieve the

hydraulic pressure Hydraulics (from Greek: Υδραυλική) is a technology and applied science using engineering, chemistry, and other sciences involving the mechanical properties and use of liquids. At a very basic level, hydraulics is the liquid counte ...

of air and glue, hammering the dowel home or clamping the joint can split the wood. An old solution to this problem is to plane a flat on the side of the dowel; some sources suggest planing the flat on the rough stock before the final shaping of the round dowel. Some dowel plates solve the problem by cutting a groove in the side of the dowel as it is forced through; this is done by a ''groove screw'', a pointed screw intruding from the side into the dowel cutting opening. When two pieces of wood are to be joined by dowels embedded in blind holes, there are numerous methods for aligning the holes. For example, pieces of shot may be placed between the wood pieces to produce indentations when the pieces are clamped together; after the clamp is released, the indentations indicate the center points for drilling.

History

The word ''dowel'' was used in

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old Englis ...

; it appears in Wycliffe's Bible translation (circa 1382–1395) in a list of the parts of a wheel: "...and the spokis, and dowlis of tho wheelis..." 3 Kings 7:33 in Wycliffe's Bible.

References

{{Nuts (hardware) Fasteners Joinery Woodworking fr:Goujon (bois)

Wood dowel

Manufacturing process

Application

History

See also

References