While dowel jigs can be very useful if you want to drill some holes to reinforce something with dowels, they’re not absolutely necessary, and you can definitely get by without one.  We’ll explain how you can do it here. The reason doweling jigs are so useful is that you need to make sure that the holes you’re drilling on each piece of wood line up with each other, but you can do that without one. The simplest way is to take a piece of scrap wood that you don’t need for anything else Make sure that it’s about the same size as the other pieces of wood you’re going to use.  Carefully mark two points on it that are the right distance apart, and then hammer a nail into each of those points.   Use a pair of bolt cutters to take the nail’s heads off, and you’ll be left with fairly sharp points in their place.  You can now press these into the points you’ve chosen for your dowels. When you take them off your wood, they’ll leave marks in the places where you need to put your dowels. Repeat as necessary for however many dowels you need to use.  This isn’t 100% accurate, but it’s good enough for most things and can be done very quickly - it’s certainly a lot quicker than measuring everything out manually.