Veritas - Master Dowel Maker Set 05J45.20 (Rating: 5)

I have been trying to make my own device for making dowels, following some ideas I picked up on YouTube. These attempts have not gone over very well (read, epic fail). So, I had given up and instead purchased this fine product.

To be thorough, I purchased the master set, which includes all of the inserts needed to create dowels from 1/4" to 1" in 1/16" increments. There are quite a bit of steps involved in setting it up for a particular size, and several trials are necessary, cutting off the portion you've tried, until you get the final, well rounded dowel. So, it seems to me that when I want to start making dowel, I should make a lot of it at a time.

The last picture shows my first attempt, which was done with pine, that wasn't cut accurately to size, and was probably way too long, and wasn't braced as they suggested as it came out the other end. So, yea, there are some rough spots on the dowel, but I have plenty of room for improvement.

I give it five stars, as it is clearly a high quality tool. Oh, one minor issue I had was when tightening the blade guide after setting the depth. If you tighten it too hard, when you loosen it, you can loosen the whole blade holder too, which then requires you to re-set the blade's position as if you had removed it for sharpening. Annoying the first time, but then I realized that I didn't have to snug it down so darn tight.