In the past I have always shied away from using dowels in my joinery.  This is mainly simply due to my inability to drill the holes straight and have them align with holes on the other side.  This all changed with this tool.   Not only does it help with drilling the dowel holes straight but it also self centers on your work piece.  Then this jig also can help with laying out each dowel location.  IE. no marking required.  This review will be a short one since there is not really that much to say about it.

Also as a call out I found out about this tool from another creator ILikeToMakeStuff or is YouTube Please check him out. There is a lot of good stuff that he is doing and has done.

Where to get one:

• AUTOTOOLHOME Self Centering Doweling Jig

Specs(From the Amazon page):

• Material: Aluminum alloy6061(drill guide) ,steel( bushing)
• Surface treatment: Anodic oxidation treatment
• Material of drill bushing: Steel HRC50°
• Bushing Size: 1/4, 5/16, 3/8 inch(3pcs each size,millimeter )
• Locating Dowel Pin: 1/4, 5/16, 3/8 inch
• Drill Guide Size: 23.5 × 15 × 6cm/9.2 × 5.9 × 2.3"

Whats Included(From the Amazon page):

• 1 x Self Centering Dowelling Jig
• 1 X 1/4" dowel Pin
• 1 X 5/16" dowel Pin
• 1 X 3/8" dowel Pin
• 3 X 1/4" Drill Sleeve
• 3 X 5/16" Drill Sleeve
• 3 X 3/8 "Drill Sleeve

First Thoughts:

My First thoughts on this is that it is relatively inexpensive and is very simple to use. The Packaging was simple but will not be good for long term storage.
You simply select from 1 of the three different guide sizes. Screw the guides into the jig. Clamp the jig onto your work and it will find the center. Start drilling, now there is a little more but that is basically it. There are several alignment options to get each dowel to align up when doing your glue up that ave very simple to use to get repeatable reliable dowel alignment.

After Some Use:

I purchased this to build the box for my wife's raised planter box. Each of the sides and bottom of the box were joined with many dowels which took some time. But with the use of the locating dowel this did not take as much time as it would have if I did it all by hand.
The above image was not planned I needed to cut down one of the sides and left almost exactly half of the dowel on the waste. The only issue that I had come across was more an issue with me being impatient and not clamping the stock causing me to wander with the drill resulting in additional ware in the drill sleeves. But like I said I will not be taking any points from this since this was mostly my fault.

Conclusion:

I had at first thought about getting a Domino Jointer from Festools but that was way too expensive for me right now. I am also not the biggest fan of the biscuit jointer. For this project I needed a way to have repeatable way to cut/drill the dowel locations. Now I could have made my own jig that would have worked but in the end it would had taken me more time. I would highly recommend this tool. It is for the most a one trick pony but if you are needing to do dowels either a lot in one project ore often it will be money well spent.

Also at some point I intend to updated this with a video or more pictures showing the use I had thought about just grabbing what I had in stock for example but did not want to waste the stock at this time.