Doors & Drawer Fronts

As of January 24, 2010, the following picture shows how the kitchen upstairs looks. Our focus is now to build the doors and drawer fronts for the base cabinets. We will begin that process in this blog entry. The bright sunlight at the window resulted in a poor picture, but it shows a starting point for this entry.

I got a piece of paper, pencil and a tape measure and systematically measured and recorded the size of each opening, moving around the room from left to right. The side pieces for each door and drawer front extend the full length. The top and bottom piece are to fit in between and the opening left in the center is filled with a piece of plywood. We will cover the required steps.

Since each door and drawer front overlaps by five eights of an inch - dimension determined by the door hinge design - I needed to add an inch and one quarter to each side length - five eights plus five eights equals ten eights equals an inch and one quarter. I then proceeded to cut out two for each opening according to this new dimension.

The next challenge was to determine the length of the top and bottom piece that completed the frame around the door or drawer front. To do that I added an inch and one quarter to each width, but I still needed to figure the length of the actual pieces. Since I am a visual person I decided to clamp my carpenters square to my workbench and lay the two side pieces down as they would form the two sides and measure the distance in between and add one half inch and record the dimension. The extra half inch is required for the joint I am going to form. I could have done this without laying out all the pieces on the workbench, but it was a way of checking my work at that point. I laid aside each pair as I went.

The above picture shows a double door required for a cabinet and after I had cut the top and bottom piece. I took that picture to give you some idea of what was happening. I cut those extra pieces needed for the top and bottom and put the four pieces required for each door and drawer front together in the pile of pieces, - 60 pieces - as shown in the picture below.

The next step is to set up the table saw and dado out a grove around the inside to allow the insertion of the plywood panel and the top and bottom edge piece. Two widths of the saw blade is just right and if I set the saw up to make each cut on the side of center, I can pass each piece through twice and have the dado exactly in the center. I set the saw to cut one quarter inch deep - thus the required extra one half inch to each length - and cut all the dados. The result was a pile of 60 pieces shown in the next picture.

Once I cut the dado into the side of each piece, I need to set the table saw for cutting the quarter inch extension on the ends of the top and bottom pieces to complete the joint. As I write this I realize I needed two more pictures: one showing the saw setup for cutting the dado and the other showing the set up for cutting the extension on the ends.

Now that all the pieces are prepared we can begin to assemble. We will cover this in our Thursday entry. Don't forget to come back on Wednesday for more information about Lisa.