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Doweling jig for 90 degree butt joints in particle board.

J

John Holloway

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4
Location
South Central PA
I have a few 30" x 30" x 12" wall cabinets to construct for the shop, and am considering using 3/4" melamine instead of plywood due to pricing and availability issues of BB, and poor quality issues with ply from the Borg. I prefer dowels for corner butt joints, but don't presently have a doweling jig suitable for both board ends of the cabinet tops and bottoms, as well as for the the board face holes in each end of the left and right sides. That being the case, can somebody recommend a reasonably priced dowel jig that can perform both sets of holes. Thanks
 
I don't have any personal experience with the kind of jig you're looking for, but I did want to say Welcome to the forum, John. :wave:
 
In the two years that I worked in a small commercial cabinet shop, we never used a dowel. We used biscuits very, very rarely and only in bare wood products (wood, PB and MDF). Our cabinets were not glued.

We aligned the cabinet parts by hand then used brads to hold them while we drilled and screwed the parts together. Once the backs, bottoms and upper aprons were in place you could barely twist the cabinets. After fastening to a wall they were rock solid.

People tend to overbuild (that's ok but not necessary). If it were me and I wanted a bit of extra strength and some alignment assistance I'd use biscuits and in your case a Melamine glue like Titebond.

... and that's my $0.05 ..... it doesn't answer your question, but it provides an alternative.

cheers
 
Can't offer you a suggestion for the jig, John's suggestion of screws I've used and for shelf pin holes I've just used some pegboard for laying the holes out evenly. I think i did buy a Kreg shelf pin jig at one point, but mostly to match some existing cabinets I had bought due to the 5mm pin sizes. It worked well.

BTW, Welcome to the family! :wave:
 
Don Baer said:
I have used one like this and it worked very good. Made literally hundreds of holes with one. I got mine from Rocklers but Amazon has em too.
Click to expand...
The OP needs to do dowel holes on the material face as well as ends. Does this jig do that? I couldn't find anything that showed that ability but, if it does, that's a winner. The other option is to use a board-end type jig and dowel centers. I will chime in that doweling in this manner . . .

weak dowel.jpg

. . . creates a pretty weak joint. I'm not saying that is the extent of your use . . .I'm just sayin' . . .

Also . . . WELCOME!
;)
 
The jessem doweling jig will do that joint, although I'm not claiming it's cheap.. You basically just need to register off of the "same" side so any opened ended jig would work for some value of work (even the cheap milescraft would be.. ok.. ish.. it's pretty flimsy but.. it would work https://www.amazon.com/Milescraft-1332-Joint-Mate-Self-Centering/dp/B09RQ53CMR/), or you can diy something similar.

I'd echo others note that the dowels don't add a lot of strength here, but sure can be useful for alignment, can't argue that as I use them for that on occasional as well :). For cabinet cases I'll usually stick one on each end and one in the middle to keep it all aligned. Biscuits would undoubtedly work as well and be faster for that but I don't have a biscuit jointer and do this rarely enough it's never seemed worth it.
 
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