I once helped a friend build a bookcase, and I used the technique of pegging the bookcase together with dowels. He called it magic.

It’s not magic, and it’s not hard. It requires a bit of thought and a bit of care, that’s all. But it does look neat, and it’s particularly useful for something like this where you want to be able to dismantle it quickly for storage.

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And just to make this even more impressive – all the end pieces are interchangeable – you don’t have to worry about which one fits where.

So how do we perform this magic?

Making a jig

Well, the first thing to do is to make a jig, which is a piece of material we use to ensure we always drill the same holes in the same place.

You need two pieces from your main wood, one approx 6cm and one approx 4cm. You may have some spare pieces left over that will do.

They need to be screwed together so that they make a “stair” exactly the same length as the width of your wood.

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Now, in the “stair” part of the jig, we need to drill two 6mm holes. They should be roughly central across the width of the stair, but it is ESSENTIAL that they are NOT the same length from each end.

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Yours don’t have to be as off-centre as that – I did it like this to show the difference. If they are approx 3cm and 4cm from the two ends, that’ll be fine.

Preparing the end pieces

Take one of the ends, and lay it on your workbench. If you can put it against a couple of stoppers, all the better. Take the jig, and put it on top of the end, so that the holes are lined up ready to drill into the end of the wooden piece. And now clamp the whole lot together.

Then put a bit of tape round your drill as a depth marker at about 40mm. Hold everything together carefully with your free hand, and drill through the jig into the end of the wood till the depth marker reaches the jig. You’ll have drilled about 20mm into the end piece.

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You now have two holes in one of your end pieces. Rotate the end piece 180 degrees – DO NOT TURN IT OVER – and repeat the process on the other side.

Every end piece is done like this.

There is something to be said for drilling them all before you start doing anything else. So that’s what I did.

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Remember what I said about rotating the end piece – not turning it over? I had to redrill that one 🙂

Drilling the holes into the bottom.

If you’re feeling cautious, get a spare piece of timber to practice.

If you’re feeling brave, get one of your 26.5cm pieces that goes at the bottom. As this piece is very nearly square, make sure you’re using the edge, not the front.

Place the piece on the workbench, and put the jig on top of it, making sure the edge of the jig is lined up with the edge of the piece of wood. Clamp it down, and drill through the jig. DO NOT GO RIGHT UP TO THE DRILL MARKER – you will drill clear through the wood if you do. Err on the cautious side on this one.

Then take your end piece, put two dowels into the holes, offer it up to the base, keep your fingers crossed, and ease it onto the base.

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If your first try is as good as that – well done!

If it doesn’t quite go down completely, drill out the holes in the end pieces a bit more. If it doesn’t fit precisely, well, this is not precision engineering. You can see that by making the holes in the jig asymmetrical, you can’t put the piece in the wrong way round.

Now turn the base, get another end piece, and do exactly the same on the other side. You can see in my photo that the second piece didn’t fit quite so well as the first, but never mind.

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Continuing up

Now, get one of the 49cm pieces and put it on the workbench, and lay the bottom piece onto it. Measure up so that it’s exactly in the middle, and put a small pencil mark at each end. Put the jig onto the large piece up to one of marks, check with a set square, and clamp it down. Then drill the holes as usual.

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Rotate the board, and do exactly the same on the other side at the other pencil mark.

Put the dowels in place, and fit the next piece on! You’ll have to ease it on, probably pushing the end pieces outwards a bit.

And now you just keep going up.

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You will find it’s easier to build if you put the dowels in the boards rather than the end pieces.

You will also find the pieces get harder and harder to fit as you get nearer and nearer the top. But a little care and determination will get them fitted. If the worst comes to the worst, you may find that you’ll have to fit the very top bits with only two dowels – that’s what I had to do with my original one.

Well done! That’s the difficult bit done. Now we can move onto the next step.

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