Last weekend I continued my work on the kitchen cabinet doors by cutting and sanding all of the flat panels for the base cabinet doors.

Then I glued up all of the doors for both base and top cabinets.

Before I started to work on the outside edges of the doors, I wanted to get the pocket holes drilled for the stupid European hinges as well as the holes for the handles.  I wanted to do them before I did anything with the outside edges because cleaning up the outside edges does change the dimensions of the door slightly.  Since I want stupid European hinges to be positioned exactly on the frames of the cabinets, I thought it best to machine the mechanical parts of the door first.

When I drilled the holes for the handles on all of the drawers as well as the doors on the bathroom vanity, I just measured them by hand with a machinist’s rule.  Although that works, it is a slow process and is given to slight inaccuracies that needed to be reamed out when I installed the handles.

For these, I decided to break out my trammel points to position the holes.

Why I did not think of these for all of the other handles I drill, I do not know.  It made the process considerably faster as well as much more accurate.

In the end, I got the holes drilled in about 1/4 the time it would have taken me doing it by hand and when I test fitted the handles, they fit perfectly.

When fitting the rails and stiles together during glue up, I had to trim and adjust the mortises and tenons a bit to get the inside of the joint nice and tight.  That left the top and bottom of the stiles standing a bit proud of the top and bottoms of the rails.

So, the next step was to spend some quality time with my belt sander to get all of the corners nice and flush and square.

The next step was to put the final profile on the outside edges.  We used a real simple 1/2 inch round-over for the outside, primarily because of the dust in the desert.  I think we should be able to get away with a simple edge because of the glass and the fancy crown moulding on the cabinets.

My last effort, last weekend, was to get the hinges installed and test fit the bottom cabinet doors.

Getting the hinges positioned on a door for any corner base cabinet is always an effort in frustration.  I made two of these for our kitchen in Minnesota and neither one came out very good as far as I was concerned.  Since this is going to be our “forever home”, I wanted it to come out right.

So, I took a couple of perfectly square plywood boxes that normally hold nails and screws in my workshop and used them as a template for holding the door parts square while I drilled the holes for the hinges.

Then, I went ahead and drilled and screwed the piano hinge on.

Note: You may notice, the piano hinge is a seriously heavy-duty beast.  Amazon claimed it is designed to hold over 600 pounds.  The reason I bought such a monster is that is was the only piano hinge I could find that was also a full 3 inches wide.  That, plus it cost me a whopping $8 as opposed to $48 per hinge for the ones that are designed for corner cabinets.  So, not only did I save $88, I got a door that is many times stronger than if I had gone with the “correct” way of doing it.

The end result came out better than I had hoped.

I had to step away from house building Monday through Wednesday this week to be able work my normal job and be able pay the taxes and insurance on this dump, so Tina took over working on the cabinet doors.

Our original plan was finish the bottom doors first and leave the finishing of the top cabinet doors until after we had the glass for them.  But the estimates for the glass came in at about 1/3 the cost we expected!  So we decided to let the glass people install the the glass instead of us doing it ourselves.  The big reason being, they have the tools to do any fine fitting whereas we would have to fine fit the glass by carving away at the doors.

So Tina’s big push this week was to get the top doors sanded and finished while I was working on work stuff, with enough time left for me to test hang them and get them back to the glass shop before close of business on Friday.

Sanding and finishing is a pain to begin with.  But sanding and finishing furniture joints is MUCH more work than sanding and finishing traditional cabinetry joinery.  Even when the joinery is machine cut, nothing ever fits perfectly flush.  Inconsistencies in the wood as well as differences in the temperature and humidity make a HUGE difference in how tightly the parts fit together.  Sanding, especially with the courser, low number, grits is a LOT of work.

She spent 3 1/2 days sanding and sanding and sanding, then finishing and more finishing and more sanding.  But the end result was absolutely outstanding!

I marked the worst joint that I had on the top doors and this is what it looks like now.

Today, I had the day off from work so after Tina put the last coat of varnish on the top doors and they had a chance to mostly dry, I drilled them for hinges and we test fitted them on the cabinets.

Tomorrow, we will take the drive to Tucson to pick up the last of the base moulding, a few more red oak boards to finish off the custom moldings I need to make and drop off the doors with the glass people.

We are nearly done with the house.  We basically, have only 3 more main efforts to complete – moulding, a shelf behind the wood stove in the living room and the backsplash behind the kitchen counter.  I am finally ready for the construction to be done.  But I am also not sure what I am going to do with myself when it IS done.  Today, waiting for the last coat of varnish to dry on the kitchen doors, with nothing to do, I was crawling out of my skin!

This week has been HUGE at M. T. Acres!

It started with Tina getting the baseboard moldings varnished for the guest bedroom.  Then I got them installed, with the help of Belle of course.

Tina varnished a few more sticks of molding than I needed for the guest bedroom, so I decided to just use up what she had varnished in the guest hallway and part of the main hallway.

I think I did a pretty good job getting the outside corners to match up as well.

With the guest bedroom done and my office done, Tina was able to spend the rest of the week attacking the big pile of stuff we had stored in the living room.

When we got the occupancy certificate for M. T. Acres and moved from the rental house, we did not bother to unpack many boxes since we are still working on the house.  So we just made a great big pile of furniture and boxes in the living room to keep the rooms we were working on empty.  Most of the boxes had not been opened since we packed them in Minnesota.  We literally had a path about 18 inches wide going from the door of the master bedroom to the kitchen/dining area.  The rest was pretty much, floor-to-ceiling boxes and furniture!

With two good sized rooms now done, Tina was able to work her butt off to get things actually unpacked and moved into my office and the guest bedroom, and more importantly, get the pile in the living room gone!

This is wonderful!  It is the first time M. T. Acres has felt like a “home” rather than just another “work in progress”.  As I write this, Tina is sitting in the living room, which is empty except for the stuff that belongs in living room, watching a DVD on our real TV connected up to our real sound system!

For my part, I started on making the doors for the kitchen cabinets.  Normally kitchen cabinet panel doors are pretty easy to make because the stiles (the vertical pieces) and the rails (the horizontal pieces) joined using a cope & stick joint.  That joint only requires a matched set of router bits and 2 passes on the router table to make the completed joint.

https://www.mlcswoodworking.com/shopsite_sc/store/html/smarthtml/pages/rail_and_stile_router_bits1.html

The problem with it is you can only give the doors a profile of one of the 6 or 8 profiles they make router bit sets for.

We want to minimize the fillets and ogees (grooves, etc.) that can collect grease and dust due to living in the desert.  Also, since all of the top doors are going to have glass panels, we need the doors to be strong.  So I opted to use an old furniture-maker’s joint called a mitre & mortise joint.  The mitre & mortise joint is a complex joint, but it can mostly be cut with the table saw and only requires hand work with a bench chisel to clean up the cuts and do the final fitting of the joint.

Before I started on the doors however, I decided to make jig to make it easier to cut the joints.  I decided to call the jig Barbie because she loves to be accessorized.

Next, I decided to make an “accessory” to allow me to make cross-grain cuts with a stop on the left side of the saw blade.  This allows me to use the same setup regardless of how long or short the rails and stiles are.

The next “accessory” was a fence to allow me to make very accurate rip cuts.

Finally, I made an accessory for cutting tenons.

As you will in next few minutes, Barbie turned out to be a great thing.  However, I am left feeling pretty stupid for not figuring out to make it 15 years ago!

On to doing the joinery…

The first thing I did was cut the mortises in the stiles.  This is one of the few cuts in this joint where I had some wiggle room on cutting it accurately.

Next I cut the mitres on the stiles, then the rails.  These have to be exactly 45 degrees and the depth of the cut has to be exactly 3/8″.  Also the location of the cut on the stiles has to be exactly 2 3/8″ from the end of the stiles (because the stock is a total of 2 3/8″ wide) and 1 3/8″ from the end of the rails (because I am using 1″ tenons).

Then I set the saw blade to 90 degrees and cut the shoulders for the tenons on the rails.

The placement and depth of the cut must be extremely precise.  Anytime I need a cut to be extremely precise, I always cut it a little bit short and do the final fitting with a chisel.

Then I changed the saw blade to a rip blade and setup Barbie for the vertical cuts.  I started by trimming down to the top of the mitre on the stiles.

Next I cut the outside, then inside haunches around the tenons on the rails.

Finally, I dressed Barbie with her tenoning “accessory” and cut the tenons.

After spending a day and a half cleaning and fitting each joint with a bench chisel, I was able to dry fit the joint together and see how they are going to look.

Obviously, I am pretty dang happy with how tight they came out!

Once I was confident all of the joinery is going to fit together, I was able to cut the dados to hold the flat panels on the bottom doors and the rabbits to hold the glass on the top doors.

Finally, I routed the decorative edge on the insides on all of the rails and stiles and did a final dry fitting.

I am pretty pleased with myself for how these are coming out.  I have not done any “fine woodworking” in about 2 1/2 years and the last time I did, it was sloppier than what I like.  So I was concerned that maybe my skills were diminishing.  But after doing these, I am confident that my skills are still there.