Festool Domino Hire

Why I spent almost $2,000 on a fancy woodworking tool (and how you can use it, too)

I have too many specialised tools. I have a German beer brewing computer, an infrared draught detection camera, an archival quality photo printer to name only a few. They’re all highly useful but, of course, typically idle.

Some years ago, I discovered amateur woodworking. After failing the subject at high school, I was pleased to discover the pleasures of making things out of wood in my adult life. I soon assembled a costly arsenal of high quality tools. I bought a track saw, a router, a sturdy table with a CNC machined top and an entire toolbox bursting with clamps and squares and other apparatus.

One piece of gear that I’ve resisted the urge to buy is a Festool Domino. It’s a handheld machine that bores precise mortises, allowing you to join wood together with small domino shaped pieces of beech timber.

This allows woodworkers to create strong and efficient bonds between pieces of wood that would be impractically slow or cumbersome by other means. While I love the idea of meditatively chiselling out a mortise by hand, I have two small children and a wife and a demanding job. I don’t have those skills or the time to develop them.

For the casual DIYer, creating joints of this kind means dowels or pocket screws. Dowels are fiddly (and the jigs can cost a few hundred dollars themselves) and pocket screws are ugly.

If you can buy a tool that makes your job easier and better, then you should buy it. As Henry Ford said:

“If you need a machine and don't buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don't have it.“

I fully ascribe to this logic in my business life. I throw money at Apple for the latest fully loaded MacBooks, etc. as often as they let me. During the pandemic I assembled a video conferencing rig suitable more for a TV studio than a home office.

But as a hobbyist, spending $1,700 on a covetous device that will go un-used for 48 weekends of the year seemed slightly ludicrous. It’s not even the money so much as the waste. If other people want to use this tool, why not see if I can buy it and we can share the cost together?

A quick Google tells me that others have found the same. They want to use a Domino for a project, or to try one out, but they don’t want to commit to owning one.

To that end, I have finally bought my Festool Domino. I plan to use it to make a chair in the style of Donald Judd. Then to construct a bed for my youngest son. And then I’ll maybe even tackle some joinery and draws and whatnot.