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Sanding is the key, although is does sound like your chisels are dull. They shouldn't burn. Birch is the volume standard wood for dowels. Even makers of maple furniture will use birch turnings because it's cheaper than maple and easier to turn.
I'm looking for maple dowels or squares and found some at Thompson Maple Products in PA. The base price for kiln-dried 1-3/8" x 8-7/8" maple dowels is 9 cents. But they get $25.00 for packing up 200 of them and another $24 or so for shipping FedEx. So they're about 35 cents each. I'm gonna get 200 and try them out.
I've been making some plugs out of cherry because I found some nice 1-1/4" cherry boards (leftovers about 10' wide and 3 feet long) at Mancini's in N. Kingstown, for $3 each. Cherry often has a wierd grain, though, and they often split diagonally across the plug. But cherry is more dense than birch, although not as dense as maple.
Maple at Home Depot in N.K. was rediculously expensive and too thin for anything but needles. They didn't have any maple dowels. A guy tried to sell me an oak stick, 1-1/4" square by three feet long for $14. HD obviously wants it more than I do!
Sharpen those chisels and you should be okay.
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