Dowel inserting machinery can be either manual or fully automatic. Dowels are normally used for construction where two pieces of wood are being attached together such as in book cases, desks, chair making, etc. Boring machines have already been covered under previous categories, therefore we will presume that the hole or holes have already been pre-drilled to insert the dowels in the manual style system. Dowel inserting is usually done with a gun of sorts. Dowels are placed in a vibrating reservoir (hopper) which stores the dowels and passes them to the gun when the trigger is applied. The gun has glue application as well that allows glue to pass into the pre-drilled holes when the trigger is pulled at the same time as the dowel is inserted into the hole. The dowel inserter is specially designed with a guiding system that ensures that the glue and the dowel actually go into the hole. Manual machines normally have one gun and are relatively small machines that can be pushed around the factory on wheels to be used where required.
For more automated dowel inserting machinery there are specific machines for high volume. These machines are what are considered to be through feed boring and dowel inserting machines which were discussed under Boring Machines. Once the pre-required holes are drilled the piece passes into a secondary operation sometimes as part of the boring machine or sometimes to a second machine which is in line with the borer that now installs the dowels. In this case numerous dowels can be installed at the same time. As an example a panel that requires six holes on each side would go through the through feed boring machine first and would pre-drill the six holes per side then the part would pass into the second machine which might have six guns on each side, each one putting a bit of glue into each hole and then shooting the dowel into each one of the pre-drilled holes. The dowel inserters are hopper fed, one hopper on each side of the machine, which is a large vibrating bowl (similar but larger than the manual system) that feeds one dowel into each of the guns. Some of these machines can have from three to six guns per side which can be modified to handle dowels of different diameters. A glue pot is also attached, normally one per side, which passes the glue to the gun. These glue pots and the lines which hold the glue have to be cleaned on a daily basis otherwise the glue will set and become hard overnight. Today dowels are available that are pre glued and liquid will re-activate the glue.
Dowel Making Machines are to make wooden dowels for assembly construction, dowel pins or full length dowel rods. Most of these starts as a long square piece of material and through a process of shaper cutters are made into round dowels either with an automatic machine or a semi-manual one.
Dowel Equipment – Trim/Bore/Shape/Chuck
Double End Chucking Machines - used to make round ends on a solid piece of square or rectangular wood, often used in the crib industry so that the bars of the crib will fit into normal round holes in the top and bottom rails of the crib side.
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