On Fri, 1 Jan 2021 09:22:53 -0800 (PST), "
wrote:

On Friday, December 18, 2020 at 11:11:02 PM UTC-6, wrote:
It's been a while, but I have gotten some good advice here.

https://flic.kr/p/2kgvcD4

I'm recycling some 1.5" thick butcher-block style table top material that I got for free. The piece was a weird shape, something like 15" x 84". I wanted to make it about 41"x26" for a small coffee table, although I haven't decided yet what to put underneath the top.

I cut it in half lengthwise and then ripped it down with a circular saw and straightedge. It was difficult due to a not-great saw, a not-great blade and my not-great skills. I kind of butchered it, even doing the cut in three passes, but I was expecting that. I "jointed" the edge with a router, a straightedge and a straight bit, which worked well.

Anyway, despite a heck of a lot of long-grain surface to glue, I decided to use dowels to fasten the two pieces together. I figured that - if nothing else - they would make the alignment easy and nothing would slip when I put the clamps on. It worked well, but were the dowels a waste of time, at least for strength?


I'm real late responding to this question. And I think what I am saying has already been said. But... For strength, long grain glued to log grain is super strong when glued and clamped using yellow glue. No need for additional mechanical fasteners like dowels. For alignment purposes, dowels would help. But I have never used dowels so I am skeptical its very easy to use them for alignment purposes. You have to be super super super precise aligning the drilling apparatus to make the holes for the dowels. If you are that precise with drilling the dowels to make them actually work, why not just use a little of that effort to line up the boards and glue them up right in the first place. I do use biscuits for aligning boards to edge glue. I guess they add strength too. But who cares since the long grain is super strong when done gluing. But biscuits are super easy to use and line up boards perfectly with no thought or effort. I don't think dowels are as easy to use as
biscuits. Which is why biscuits were invented by Lamello I think a while ago. They replace cumbersome dowels for the lining up purposes.

A decent doweling jig handles the alignment. You can buy them for not
a huge amount of money, or make one.