The Wolf wrote:
If you start with a square stock and make an octgagon and keep going
won't it eventually turn into a round dowel 1-1/4"

Anyone done this? What are the angles?

I've made tool handles that way. No, you can't make it round. Sooner or
later you'll be sending a piece through the saw that won't have enough
of a flat face and it'll want to roll and it won't feel safe. I settled
for a piece with many flat sides. In fact I liked that feel more than
round, but that's probably not important here. My point is, there's a
point somewhere between flat and round when it gets scary and you won't
want to do it any more, and if you do, you could probably get hurt.

Amana sells router bits with a 5/8 inch radius and probably others do
too. I'd go that route. Four passes. I've seen TV articles on diynet
where the artist made his dowels that way. The process looked safe and
the dowels looked good.

You could also make a simple box with nails at each end to hold the
stock, and put a router on a board above the piece, and you've got a
very simple, primitive router lathe. That's in one of my router books.

Or you could go really primitive and get a drawknife. They make
surprisingly good dowels in a surprisingly short time. But you might
need more precision than that. :-)

But no, in my experience the table saw will, uh, cut corners, but not
make nice round dowels.