Due to my work schedule, we did not have a whole lot of time to work on the build this week. But we were able to get the cabinet carcasses that I cut last week glued up. I still have to cut the carcasses for Tina’s built-in ovens and build a center island cabinet for the kitchen. Those two are going to be kind of a bugger to cut due to their size. I am going to have to do all of the dados in them by hand with a router because they are too big to manage on my tablesaw. But otherwise the case work is done.
The really fun part of building cabinets is doing the face frames, doors and drawers. This week, I started on the face frames.
The first order of business was planing down the face frame stock to fit the door hinges. We could only get those stupid European hinges for the doors because they do not make the traditional half-lap hinges anymore in any styles that we would even consider mildly good looking. So we are going to be stuck with the cabinet doors fully on the outside of the face frames.
The stupid European hinges do make the doors much easier to make because they do not require any hand fitting with a bench chisel. But I really enjoy the hand work. Plus, I do not think they look nearly as nice as the old half-lap hinges. Oh well…
The stock that I got for the face frames and the doors is exceptionally good wood. I bought 4/4 stock and it is a full 7/8 of an inch thick. (Normally 4/4 stock comes home between 3/4 and 13/16 of an inch thick.) The problem is, the hinges will only work with face frames that are 13/16 of an inch of thinner. So I had to plane all this beautiful wood down 1/16 of an inch to get the stupid European hinges to fit it.
It breaks my heart to throw away all that good wood but on the upside, I already have 3 full garbage bags of sawdust (the most useful substance known to man) from this project. Plus, there is no better smell than the smell of oak or walnut sawdust; The whole house reeks of it right now! It is wonderful.
On a side note:
Before I started to rip the boards for the face frames, I decided to clean up my tablesaw top with some Boeshield.
If you have not used this stuff, it is absolutely amazing. It was created by Boeing for use on the machines in their shop, but they started selling to the general public about 10 years ago. I cannot imagine a lubricant for a tablesaw top that could be better. I spray it on, them wipe it around with a paper rag and let it dry for 20-30 minutes. That’s it. It makes the top very slippery and does not stain the wood (once it is fully dry).
No, Boeing did not pay me anything for the previous paragraph.
Anyway after cleaning up tablesaw, I ripped and cut the face frame boards for a couple cabinets. Then I drilled and glued them.
Yes – I am using dowel pin joinery on the face frames. The face frames need to be strong, but they only need to be rock solid strong until they get glued to the carcasses. Dowel pins give me enough strength and they give me the flexibility to get them absolutely square.
Finally, I got them glued on the carcasses.
I glued the first one up a bit early. If you look real close in the lower-right of the picture, you can see where the rail and stile of the face frame pulled apart a bit on glue up. That will not be a big deal as the final sanding will make that mostly disappear.
The second one came out perfect.
Once they were completely dry, they look pretty good.
The blue tape on the side is Tina’s note that she does not need to finish that side because it is going to be butting up to another cabinet.
Lastly, our good friend Eve invited us to help with the fall round up of her cattle the week of 10/16. Of course we wholeheartedly agreed because how cool is that?!? Eve’s cowboy Steve, who is in charge of the round up, wanted us to ride with him for half a day just to see how much of a liability we would be. We apparently passed muster because he told us to show up next Monday. So in one day (today), we got to sit on the back of a horse at the bottom of a mountain, chase some cows, and go back to M.T Acres and make sawdust! Am I living the dream or what?