An upcoming project I'm working on requires the use of dowels. I don't commonly use this type of joinery, so my tool chest lacks any jigs, or specialized tools to help with alignment. What I specifically need are a handful of dowel centers - those little metal plugs with a pointed end that you put in a dowel hole. Once you press a mating piece of wood against it, the pointed end makes a small indentation that positions the hole center.
You can of course buy these for a few bucks, but with a project this simple, it was easy to model the shape in xDesign and print out a bunch.
I made mine for a 1/4" dowel, but the design can easily be adjusted for any diameter dowel. I added a shallow chamfer to the bottom of the part to make it easy to pace into a hole, and I tapered the shoulder so the parts would print without supports!
Check out this short video that shows how the parts were designed using xDesign:
If you'd like to print your own dowel centers, you can download this ZIP file that contains:
- the native xDesign model
- a neutral STEP file
- a print-ready STL