Milescraft1311 Joint Pro Professional, Self-Clamping All Steel Doweling Jig - Quality - Includes 4 Guide Bushings for 1/4 in., 5/16 in. and 3/8 in. Dowels,Silver

Better than the $200 expensive doweling jig. Very accurate and I was able to join wood to create drawers. It is more beautiful than pocket join and more precise. And install the dowels on the wood not the jig.

I own the DowelMax, which is by far the best doweling jig on the market. We (son and I) have used it a ton, including edge gluing a 3" thick, 8 foot long slabs to make one huge table top. This required boxes and boxes of dowels, and every dowel, every hole lined up perfectly during assembly. But....there are smaller projects that require precision but don't require the slightly complex DowelMax setup. And that is where the Milescraft comes in. I just finished building monitor stands, a cabinet base, etc., that required corner joints. The beauty of the Milescraft is that you setup the two boards at the same time, drill them, and bang, the two are finished and perfectly aligned. One quick setup, two board corners finished. I found it so easy, so quick, I purchased a second JointPro to make it even faster, easily worth the total price of $112. My only complaint: The Philips head screws holding the clamps to the main body (the clamps must be moved for some operations) are soft, and easily stripped. And one screw head was not formed correctly, making it almost impossible to remove. Note that the jig does not come with drill bits (jig handles 1/4", 5/16", 3/8") nor stop collars. Regarding stop collars, they are a pain. I just drill a block of wood the thickness I need for the stop and use that. No slipping. No scaring the bit.The jig is well made, all steel except for the clamp knobs and clamp feet. The jig has some heft to it. I found nothing wrong in operation, easy as pie. Well, easy as eating pie. So it is a great doweling jig, but you might want TWO!!!!!!

This jig is almost all metal, and the plastic pieces to work the clamps are heavy-duty. It's very well made, especially for the price. I like, too, that I (eventually) figured it out without using the directions. However, on my first use, the holes I drilled didn't line up on both boards, as tested using dowels. I'm not sure what I did wrong, but I feel like something aimed at amateurs would minimize such things. The best I can guess is that when I switched which end had the jig and which had the clamp I tightened one more than I had on the previous side, leading to the misalignment. Frankly, I'm not sure how that could be remedied short of measuring or having step guides painted onto the threads.When I started this review, I was going to give the product 3 stars, but I think it actually deserves 4. It's really well-made: in a world where other roughly 50 dollar products would be plastic, this was almost all metal, and not garbage easy to bend metal either. The boards I was using were from a reject bin from the orange-branded store to use for practice and kid projects. I don't have a planer and also didn't measure the boards' thickness end-to-end so any of these things probably contributed to the misalignment. I can't fully blame the product.With better planning, I probably could have ended up with a better result.

I have never used dowels to join panels before due to the need to get the drillings spot on. For the project I bought this for constructiong cabinetry from 25mm MDF I needed to have concealed fixings and not have to fill where screws were used while very precise joints.I initially experimented with a very expensive pocket hole jig which tended to pull joints out of alignment - something which after a bit of research online I found is very hard to avoid.So I bit the bullet and bought this jig. I also had to hunt down a 3/8ths drill bit and 3/8ths dowels.First things first I have read some reviews questioning how to drill thicker stock and keep holes centred in an edge, the solution I found was simple - buy a bag of builders / glazers shims they come in thicknesses from 1mm to 6mm.Place a couple of these next to each other on the plastic plates either side of the central clamping upright of the jig - this pushes the MDF across an equal amount on both pieces. I used 4mm shims to centre the 3/8ths drilling plate in the edge of 25mm MDF, I was even able to create a slight purposeful misalingment on L joints to allow for flush routing back by using 4mm shims on one side and 3mm shims on the other creating a 1mm lip to trim back with a flush cutter.As a testimony to the ccuracy of this jig, I have never attempted dowelled joints before adn was joining 3m long sections of mdf together as edge to edge and edge to face joints with 8 groups of 3 dowels along the joint and just tapping them home with a hammer even more amazing is because the dowels I ordered were on the fat side there was literally no play in the holes. A 3 metre long L joint (edge to face) aligned perfectly along its edge and also aligned exactly at the ends.This leads to the other issue that people have raised that there is only one clamping grip to go with the drilling jig. This concerned me when I was thinking how to drill my long joins, and it would be nice to be able to buy extra clamps to secure long joins however I found that by putting the clamping tool in the centre of the long run and placing and clampingintermediate chocks that matched the thickness set by the central upright it was possible to then slide the drilling jig along the length of the work piece removing and reclamping the chocks as I went but keeping the clamping jig itself locked in place the whole time ensuring that the pieces of timber didnt move out of alignment.What I've written above probably sounds like gibberish if you havent got one of these jigs in front of you but makes sense once you start using it. I 100% recommend this to anyone looking for an accurate and versatile dowelling jig.