Lurker wrote:Anyone who thinks that sort of accuracy has any place in wood work is delusional.
As a matter of note, Robert Ingham (ic of all woodworking and student projects at Parnham House) works to a tolerance of 0.1mm. You’d be very hard pushed to call RI ‘delusional’
AndyT wrote:….I managed to make them all with the most basic £5 dowel guide. Where that didn't suit, I made my own jig from offcuts of wood which was perfectly adequate for the job.
I haven't made a set of chairs, but they are one sort of work where it often makes good sense to use a dowel joint rather than a mortice and tenon. But surely, for something like that, if you have the skill to make a set of chairs, you will make a jig suitable for your chosen design, not buy something elaborately adjustable which might well get in the way.
Ok, not all drilled holes are for dowels. Some will be for screws, but I can't think of any case where the position of a screw needs to be accurate to less than about a millimetre.
I have encountered one drilling job that needed precise hole locations - if you want to fit four metal pin shelf supports at opposite corners of a shelf and not have it wobble or need visible packing. (I'm thinking about a glass shelf in a bathroom cabinet.) Will it help with that job, remembering that you may want to drill the holes after the main cabinet has been assembled?
My other main misgiving is about reference surfaces. In hand tool woodwork, you have one face side and one face edge as reference surfaces. This device references off pairs of opposite surfaces. How would it work if your show face was planed flat but the under/ reverse / off side was left as sawn or split?
Even if you treat wood as if it was aluminium and "mill" all four sides, it won't necessarily stay uniformly flat or straight. A knot can still be felt as a lump and stresses released afterwards can turn straights into curves.
So maybe it would work on MDF or chipboard - but plenty of folk make their living making furniture from those at an economic rate without one. I can't help but think that its real usefulness would be vanishingly small.
This BC gizmo though is essentially a dowel jig, is it not? When Derek Jone’s rave review of the ‘Dowelmax’ jig was published in F&C some years ago, I immediately bought one. It was quite expensive at the time, but probably half the price of this jig. It’s also superbly accurate and works off one reference surface and it’s made in Canada, not China Alas, no longer available in the UK - Rob