New "domino killer" dowel guide for drills

[mino]

The one advantage of dowels vs. dominoes, and the reason the kitchen cabinet manufacturers and the KD furniture manufacturers associations did not include dominoes in their testing, is that there are fully automated dowel drilling and assembly machines available for dowels and none for dominoes.

So transitioning from dowel construction to automated dowel construction is simpler than from dominoes to dowels.

For very small shops the dominoes hold an edge, but for larger ones they get blown away.

Indeed.

Dowels are universally cheaper on materials as well as tools as-long-as you can use robotic and a semi-automated workflow. Drilling is cheap, Routing is expensive on a CNC. Tenons are thus expensive both on material and tool, so they are used but only where dowels are plain inadequate.

The one advantage of a tenon is that its strength allows one to minimize their quantity and thus the required workflow steps. The second advantage is self-alignment, something irrelevant if not outright undesirable in a CNC workflow.
Both are critical for labour costs when bespoke or very-low-volume production is concerned, thus saving expensive labour.

The floating tenon is an artisan woodworker's tool and DOMINO is what makes it cheap(er).
It is not a manufacturer's tool. In plain language.
---

This is why all these "DOMINO killers" dowelling jigs are so absurd. For DOMINO, the concept, is designed to bypass the expense and complication of dowels for ad-hoc and custom furniture...
This is like "discovering" horse-drawn carts as "Car killers". They clearly need no gas while grass is everywhere .. and they can unquestionably haul more than a car trunk can ..

 

[Packard]

There are many YouTube videos showing cabinet assembly automation. The one I am posting shows several different fasteners being automated, but none of them are dominoes.

There could be a few reasons. I’ve listed three; there are probably many more:

1. Festool holds a patent on the dominoes
2. Dowels are much cheaper to produce
3. Dowels are easier to feed into an automated machine



And dozens more on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Atuomatic+cabinet+manufacturing

 

[mino]

..
1. Festool holds a patent on the dominoes
...

A domino - the floating tenon thing - is not patented nor patentable. It is a millennia-old concept.
DOMINO, the machine, is patented. But that is non-applicable to line manufacturing.

I would replace it with this:
1) Holes are much cheaper to make /compared to mortises/

 

[Packard]

Indeed.

Dowels are universally cheaper on materials as well as tools as-long-as you can use robotic and a semi-automated workflow. Drilling is cheap Routing is expensive on a CNC. Tenons are thus expensive both on material and tool, so they are used but only where dowels are plain inadequate.

The one advantage of a tenon is that its strength allows one to minimize their quantity and thus the required workflow steps. The second advantage is self-alignment, something irrelevant in a CNC workflow.
Both are critical for labour costs when bespoke or very-low-volume production is concerned, thus saving expensive labour.

The floating tenon is an artisan woodworker's tool and DOMINO is what makes it cheap(er).
It is not a manufacturer's tool. In plain language.

I will agree with that assessment.

But a shop that has aspirations for major growth, would have reason to adopt an efficient dowel system.

I have the CMT dowel template system. Judging from the videos I have seen of dominoes in use, the dominoes are faster to sue for 12” deep wall cabinets where the machine can index off the front and rear edges, but slower on deeper cabinets where additional indexing has to be done.

The CMT, which is simply a template and drill system, only requires one edge be indexed for wall cabinets or base cabinets. So I think, from watching the dominoe videos, and my experience with the dowel system, that the dowels are quicker on wider panels, and about on par with narrow ones. This was especially so after I got a line voltage drill that spins at 2,500 RPMs and has sufficient torque to maintain the speed under load.

 

[Packard]

A domino - the floating tenon thing - is not patented nor patentable. It is a millennia-old concept.
DOMINO, the machine, is patented. But that is non-applicable to line manufacturing.

I would replace it with this:
1) Holes are much cheaper to make /compared to mortises/

It always struck me as domino system was Festool’s (largely successful) effort to make a better biscuit machine. It appears to have the same ease of use with a stronger fastener. Though for many applications the biscuits are adequate.

Lamello also set out to improve on the biscuit machines, but took a different approach.

I don’t think any of these machines will prove to be the final answer. Something better is going to come along, as witnessed by all the attempts at a “Domino killer”.

 

[luvmytoolz]

It always struck me as domino system was Festool’s (largely successful) effort to make a better biscuit machine. It appears to have the same ease of use with a stronger fastener. Though for many applications the biscuits are adequate.

Lamello also set out to improve on the biscuit machines, but took a different approach.

I don’t think any of these machines will prove to be the final answer. Something better is going to come along, as witnessed by all the attempts at a “Domino killer”.

Don't know if I agree with that, yes biscuits are really useful and still very relevant as a joinery method, but in many cases I would consider the Domino a superior method for probably most of the solid timber joinery scenarios that biscuits would have been used for previously. And for carcase or face frame work the Zeta would be the superior and more efficient method, especially when it removes the need to clamp or halt work until glue dries. Of course if time isn't an issue, biscuits would work just as well, but in almost any environment time is money.

I also don't really see how anything better can come along though, as pretty much all the joinery bases are comprehensively covered by the DDF40, the Zeta P2, biscuit joiners and the Domino's.

As you say though, none of these tools are the final answer, as they all perform differing types of joinery methods depending on the need and use case, with any of them complementing any of the others quite well. I use my Zeta along with the Domino on most projects.

 

[mino]

I will agree with that assessment.

But a shop that has aspirations for major growth, would have reason to adopt an efficient dowel system.
...

I think we are just bumping to language definitions here .. very-low-production is making 3-5 pieces of a given shape/size/design.

At those rates, even if you have a CNC waiting, the mantime to prepare the design files and operate the CNC is *more* than actually making the pieces as you are.

For custom stuff no CNC system will ever beat the DOMINO as @Crazyraceguy would be able to validate. He did not rely on DOMINO because it was "cool". He relied on it because it was efficient.

You cannot "adopt an efficient dowel system" for these scenarios. Any such system is inherently inefficient as the setup cost for a job is higher than using a manual method until a certain volume of repetitions, the opposite of efficiency.

Move to a series production, or semi-standard stuff and the calculus changes. Though even there, you will want your workers to use the DOMINO every time they do non-standard work as it is simply more efficient for them to do so.

Do not get me wrong. I believe dowels have their place in hobby woodworking as a well as production. But for different reasons.
For a hobby woodworker dowels are interesting simply because the mantime is "free" or close to free while the tooling costs are potentially minimal.
For manufacturing or even low-series production, it is all about automation of standard pieces production.

 

[Cheese]

Over the years, I've ripped apart several structures I assembled with biscuits and that really took no effort at all. As a matter of fact, I was completely surprised and rather irritated it took such little effort as I took the extra time and effort to machine and install biscuits and I'd say the joint came apart as easily as a glue joint only. At any rate, there was a reason I sold my biscuit joiner the day AFTER I purchased the DF 500.

Here are some interesting photos of a Cantek line boring machine in action. What DIY'er would populate a joint with dowels every 32mm? I still feel that unless the dowels are spaced at 32mm distances, a joint reinforced with Dominos is still stronger than a sloppily done dowel joint.

Here are also some photos of a Domino joint in a piece of fir. It took a couple of swings with a 2# sledge hammer to break the joint. Notice wood fibers from the mortise are still attached to both sides of the Dominos. And to separate the joint the fir was cracked in 4 locations. This is in soft fir...hardwoods would be even more difficult to separate.