I gotta suggestion on the dowel. How about you glue the dowel in. And get a very small dowell, I think a 1/16th or so. The metal one needs a hole drilled into the stab any way. Why not just drill a hole in the dowel and glue in the small dowel as the metal joiner would? I did this on 2 of the kits I did to eliminate the metal one. Worked well for me. Hope this works.

Mark Shuman