Summary

I wanted to stack some Ikea Lack tables. There are plenty of brackets, but they all take hours to print, so I decided to print 4 that would lift one set of table up. But the rest I decided to drill 1/2" holes for dowels and glue them in the table tops. The legs just drill through and the protruding part of the dowel holds them in place. The dowels swell with glue so no need to drill smaller holes.

I used one table just for the top to make a base. That was easy to drill the holes since you could just go through the back. In retrospect, I should have done all the drilling ahead of time. But I'd already put the tables together in anticipation of printing brackets. Yes, I could have taken them apart, but I didn't want to.

Drilling the legs is easy since you can use a ruler to find the center (draw an X from corner to opposite corner). But the table tops with the legs are hard to do. So I created this drill template which works for the tops or the legs.

The pilot hole is small, so the idea is you just get the drill point in there and make a mark, then remove the guide and finish the hole. You'll tear up the guide, but it is a few pennies worth of plastic and you can make more.

The legs are nominally 50.5mm square but there is quite a variation, so your mileage may vary. I went ahead and made this a customizer, but mostly just out of habit.

This was printed on my 5 year-old Printrbot Plus which has been modified more than the ship of Theseus.

The brackets in the finished product picture are these: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2002785 -- I did put two screws in the each of the back ones and cracked one. Some glue sort of fixed it. It is ugly but out of sight. But the others look great and work well.