Review: JessEm Doweling Jig – FineWoodworking

JessEm Doweling Jig, JessEm.com, $238 for master kit; $143 for 3⁄8-in. kit

I’ve used doweling jigs a lot over the years, and JessEm’s new system is the best I’ve tried. Like others, it includes a base that clamps to your work, with evenly spaced steel bushings that guide a drill bit. And there are bushing plates for 1⁄4-in., 3⁄8-in., and 1⁄2-in. dowels. But this jig goes a lot further than that.

First, the jig and its accessories are beautifully machined, and the drill bits—a weak point with most doweling jigs—are top-class, cutting without tearing, and ejecting chips smoothly.

The perfect machining makes fence alignment very precise, with detents at popular offsets, letting you place dowels at various distances from the edge, or use more than one row of dowels in thicker stock.

Side-to-side alignment is just as good, with four valuable ways to do it. There’s a centerline mark that aligns with a pencil mark. There are also precise index pins that will align the jig with the last hole you drilled, allowing you to drill a row of evenly spaced holes. And there is a center notch that aligns the jig with another dowel, for panel glue-ups. Of course, you also can align the square end of the jig with the end of a workpiece, or offset it with a combo square.

I made a variety of joints with this jig, and each one came out as precise as the last, with the workpieces lining up perfectly. JessEm also sells dowels that fit the holes exactly.

While the fence plate is easy to clamp to most workpieces, the jig is even more versatile when combined with JessEm’s joinery workstation. At just $150, the Baltic-birch platform makes clamping faster and easier for all sorts of applications, including angled joints. It also accommodates JessEm’s new slip-tenon system, which I reviewed favorably in FWW #306.

—Asa Christiana.
Photos: Asa Christiana
From Fine Woodworking #310.