dowel machine

A good machine is around 7500.00 an ok machine 4500.00- 5500.00 not cheep. good thing my good buddy Rick has the 7500.00 model and lets me use it when ever I need to. I can run a few hundred squares through it and it doesn't even phase it.
 
too easy

Tom, figured you would have already modified this thing to spit out a pro tapered shaft. i'd almost bet my life you have looked at it to see if its possible;)
 
LGSM3 said:
Tom, figured you would have already modified this thing to spit out a pro tapered shaft. i'd almost bet my life you have looked at it to see if its possible;)
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LOL, I thought about that as well. Too funny Jacob!
 
hillscues said:
A good machine is around 7500.00 an ok machine 4500.00- 5500.00 not cheep. good thing my good buddy Rick has the 7500.00 model and lets me use it when ever I need to. I can run a few hundred squares through it and it doesn't even phase it.
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Hi,

I bought very good doweling machine and since I have done this Darrin's and my shaft wood has is absolutely awesome. We both pick our 5/4 kiln dried planks from the same resource. After culling out the quarter sawn perfectly straight planks with zero crown or wiggle we place them on the side from the bunk of planks. Then we only take the planks that are the heavies and leave the lightweight ones behind.

Our shafts are coming in between 3.8 and 4.6 oz at final cuts. If you don't classify the planks then dowel them yourself, you will not get consistent shafts because someone else already picked out the good stuff from a random group of wood. Selecting and classifing the planks leads to a very low shaft rejection rate and consistent quality.

Botton line is the doweling machine pays for itself in quality and money. We are getting 1" premium shaft dowels for under 4.00 each including the lumber yard cost of ripping cutting off squares to 5/4 x 5/4 x 30". If you rip on the band saw and do the 30" cross cuts you save another .50 each. For .50 I save my labor for something more profit making of tasks.

I have knives for doweling @ 1 1/2", 1 1/4", 1", and 7/8". These machines are awesome. Your really only need 1 1/2 and 1". The 1 1/4 and the 7/8 cuts down on some router time for some operations.

Rick G

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Chris Byrne said:
I have one of the same machines. They are great when you need to make some chips fast.
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To this day I wish I had been able to figure out the 3 phase motor and kept it. I hope it did not give you too much trouble figuring out the 3 phase.
 
Rick, how straight do the dowels stay after going thru that machine? When I watched the video, my first thought is how much internal stress may be released when ripping that much off in one whack. Especially with the thinner shaft wood.
Dave
 
cueman said:
To this day I wish I had been able to figure out the 3 phase motor and kept it. I hope it did not give you too much trouble figuring out the 3 phase.
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I put a static converter on it after talking to Ernie Martinez about one he used to use at showcase billiards. The machine runs good but I have to start the motors by manually engaging the plunger on the relay. I have not chased that further yet to see why it wont engage by itself. The other issue is it has 2 reverse speeds and 1 forward. The switch is not the original so I assume it was wired in backwards. I will mess with that when I chase the relay issue. However it works now so for as little as I run it, it is not a big inconvinence to start it up manually.
 
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