A recent project that I was working on called for a couple of half-round, decorative accents. After some head scratching, I came up with the idea of using dowels, leftover lumber, and my planer to create what I needed. The process starts by cutting two V-grooves in a piece of scrap lumber. This creates a sled to carry the dowels through the milling process. I drew a line on the end of the dowels that represented the stopping point. As you can see in the photo above, I used my hot glue gun to tack the hardwood dowels into the grooves. After planing the dowels to the proper thickness, I pried them off the sled and trimmed them to final length.