I knew better

Making a little project for my church.
Need to fit 3/4" dowels into holes. Without thinking I bored 3/4" holes with a Forstner bit.
Of course, the dowels don't fit. So, I reduced the ends using my 1" belt sander/grinder. Not the neatest or best way. I really don't want to buy a set of drills or Forstners that are all 1/16" inch over common sizes. In this case it would 13/64th.
Wadda y'all do?
BTW, pic of project later.

Been there and done that, but I think I would have used my lathe to reduce the ends of the dowels.

have used a drill press to do the resizing over this way ..

And all this time I thought all of them good ole boys in Arkansas knew how to use a pocketknife for everything!

Seriously, I've used a sanding block to knock some dowels back a little.

Im not sure where you got the 13/64th, I must be missing something frank. must be why my measurements are always messed up.

when I make things with dowels that need reducing a pinch at the ends, I clamp a piece of wood on my TS, raise the blade a smidgen at a time and roll the dowel (with a stop block) back and forth over the blade. Keeps it nice and round.

Vaughn McMillan said:

Been there and done that, but I think I would have used my lathe to reduce the ends of the dowels.

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Wouldn't go through my chuck and arbor and I don't have a center steady for this lathe. Of course, my first instinct was to use the lathe.

If I had the larger forstner, I'd drill a hole with it in some scrap, then line up the scrap with the hole spaced over the smaller hole and use the scrap as a guide, fixed to the work piece of course. If not probably as you did if a lathe wasn't available.

Frank Fusco said:

Wouldn't go through my chuck and arbor and I don't have a center steady for this lathe. Of course, my first instinct was to use the lathe.

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Having now seen the finished project, I can see how mounting the long dowels could be a problem.

In the past, I've had to make a bunch (100+) of 2 1/2" long tapered dowel pegs for my brother-in-law's Viking tents and furniture. Fortunately, the diameter of the dowels was small enough to feed through the spindle of my lathe, and I could grip it with a chuck. I'd feed about 3" of dowel through the headstock, tighten the chuck a bit, take a few passes with the skew, then use a saw to cut off the tapered peg. Once I got a system going, I was cranking out a peg every minute or two.