Building Little Kids Furniture
When screws are driven into core stock or solid wood, they should take a 1-inch bite, and a pilot hole, half the diameter of the screw, should be drilled first in the solid wood, to prevent splitting of the wood.
As shown in the photos, screws driven into the exposed surfaces of the project should be concealed with long-grain wood plugs. These plugs are cut with a special 1/2 inch plug cutter as needed from the sides of scrap wood. They are different from dowels because their ends have the grain pattern running across the surface, while that of the dowels have an end grain.
There are many advantages of long-grain plugs. One of the advantages is that they can be cut from wood that matches in color and grain pattern the surface being plugged, and when properly matched and fitted they become almost invisible in the finished piece. While dowels, with their end grains soak up the stain and appear considerably darker than the surrounding wood, plugs take stain finishes in the same shade as the surrounding wood.
Dowels fail to shrink and expand in the same direction as the wood which holds them, when they are used as plugs, and may in time distort due to this. Plugs on the other hand, will expand and contract in the same way as the wood. Finally, the only way to remove a dowel is to drill it out, while a plug can be chipped out easily with a 1/4- inch chisel.