Veritas Dowel & Tenon Cutter

This is a review of the Veritas Dowel & Tenon Cutter. Not to be confused with the Dowel Maker they also sell (which looks higher end and is much more expensive).

Essentially, this a formed mounting surface to accept an adjustable cutting blade that lets you peel down a piece of square stock like you’d shave down a wooden pencil in a pencil sharpener. In fact, the Dowel Cutter looks just like an enlarged manual pencil sharpener you might have hanging on a set of carpenters bags (at least I do).

On the side of the mount are two round-ish stops that allow you to simply place the mount into a bench vise, using the stops against the bench for alignment, then clamp down the vise and the cutter is held parallel to the bench. Simple but effective.

The blade is adjustable and removable (more on that later) so it can be sharpened. The adjustment is simply loosening of two Allen keyed bolts to allow you to slide the cutter deeper or shallower into the mount. There are no lines or gauges or stops or anything like that. The blade has a heavy camber and just slides in or out as you like, making adjusting easy but not necessarily simple.

The ends of the Cutter’s mount are different sized round openings. One large to allow the square stock to enter, the other very close to finish dowel diameter to add support and reduce chatter. The instructions call for square stock oversized by about a 1/16” from finished diameter. I had a piece of scrap that was 1/2” square (the Dowel Cutter I bought is to form 3/8” dowels) so this was a little big, but I figured it was just a test. 

The instructions call for a 4-point socket to hold the square stock as you drive it with a drill. I didn’t have any 4-points but did have some 8-points that worked a trick. I just picked through until I found one that held the square stock snugly. I have driver adapters for my sockets so I plugged that in and gave it a whirl with the Cutter straight from the box ‘as-is’.

The Cutter started to shave a bit, then the blank basically stopped moving forward. I pulled it out and measured the rounded end and it was well fat of 3/8”, so I loosened the set bolts and goosed the blade a little, then went again. This time was smooth sailing with big beautiful pencil-shavings peeling off. I fed at what felt like a comfortable rate for the cutter and ran through about 16” of stock. 

The things throws massive shavings, and a lot of them!!

I removed the dowel and, waddya know?? A perfect 3/8” up and down the length!!

Ok, I know that was a bit of a lucky strike. One simple adjustment and it’s perfect?? Well, I’m not screwing with it!! But I could absolutely see needing to fiddle with it a little bit to get it spot on.

That’s one of the downsides of this device. Because there aren’t any stops or settings to return to, whenever you remove the blade to sharpen it, you’ll have to fiddle with it to return to perfect. I plan the use a tape build up or glue small blocks on the blade where it bumps up against the washers of the set bolts to help make this easier.

No idea how long it will stay sharp, and I’m sure that depends on the wood, but the dowel I cut had a very nice finish on it. This was from basic Maple scrap I had.

When I was screwing with setup, there was some chatter marks evident in the dowel, but the properly sized and smoothly cut finished product wouldn’t even really need almost any sanding. 

The mount itself has holes drilled in it to allow a more permanent mounting, which is thoughtful. It’s a heavy casting, finished with powder coat and I’m sure it’ll last forever. The blade is beefy and appears of good quality. 

On the whole, it works the way it says it’s supposed to. For transparency, I’ve cut exactly ONE (1….uno, eins, een, un) dowel with this tool, and this test run was what I had time for today…but I figured it was enough for a basic review. 

I needed a dowel cutter to cut material matching dowels in specific size(s). Originally I was looking at the Veritas Dowel Maker which, as I said, is higher end. It’s more adjustable, allows multiple sizes of dowel to be cut using pieces from the kit, and is very positively reviewed. The whole kit is also over $400. What I bought, I paid $58+tax. 

Now, I can only make 3/8” dowels, but that’s all I need right now. I’ve been working on a hidden hinge build that I found online. The beauty of it is that it uses dowels cut from the same stock to make the hinge, so it disappears into the work. The downside, is you need to be able to make your own dowel for that to happen. I did a test run of the hinge using a random hardwood dowel I had on hand (1/2”) and it worked out well, but I can see why the preferred method is to use homemade dowels from the same stock as the project. 

The dowel for the test project was 1/2”, which is fine for 3/4” thick box sides (as seen above), but I find 3/4” stock too chunky for a lot of the boxes I build. I figure a 3/8” hinge will let me go down to 1/2” walls, which I like much better. 

I don’t know how much I’ll use the Dowel Cutter, or how many boxes I’ll build with it (which is why I went the $60 route and not the $400 route!!), but we’ll see. 

On first blush, I think it’s worth the $60 for custom dowels, it works as advertised, but with more fiddling than I’d expect with the expensive model. I guess we’ll also see how well it holds up! 

4/5 since there’s no built in way to return the blade to its previous position easily.