making dowls

I needed some dowels for joinery through leg to pin the side panel tenons. I drilled a 1/4" hole in a piece of metal clamped it to bench. Cut a 1/4"+ square piece of maple and hamered it through the hole. As kids we were taught you cant put a square into a round. But they didnt say unless you had a hammer.Works great for short dowels that will not be seen.

Because of the grain orientation, the roundness of a dowell varies with the humidity.

Another poster has described ounding dowelss through holes in a steel bar. That is the simplest dowell-making tool I have eerheard of. You can rip the stock octagonal instead of square before starting and one would suppose the quality of the finished dowell and the effort needed to make it would depend largely on how fine the gradations are between the holes.