I'm not saying that my method is the safest way
, but I don't use dowels on my current form. I just wrap the bands all the way around the form. I feel relatively safe doing this because I use a liberal amount of filament tape on my form to secure the bands.
Now that I wrote that, I'll tell you that my next form will have dowels drilled into it! Doing it this way will enable me to use fewer bands with more coverage.