003: under [garage] door shelving cabinet #4: cabinet doors work begins

For the doors, I had a look through my stock piles, and this board, a 1/4”x8”x4’ tulip poplar plank – picked up at Home Depot months ago simply because it was so unusually pretty – really spoke to me. The picture makes things a lot more yellow than they are in real life. It’s loaded with purples (which will probably fade in time to brown), browns, greens, yellows, and lots of gradients.

From those dimensions, I built a Sketchup model of the doors over the model I’d already made (and tweaked over and over) of the cabinet carcass. I was able to figure out how wide the stiles needed to be, given the cabinet width, and the 1/4” grooves into which the panel – which was actually 7-3/8” wide – would sit. It turned out 4’ wasn’t enough for 2 doors with rails the same height as the stiles were wide, but adding in a lock rail across the middle meant I should have just enough.

Here’s a closeup of some of the cool stuff:

I needed 2.5” wide lumber exactly, and I found in my storage shed the perfect thing – 2 ~8’ lengths of 1”x3” Millstead “select maple” I’d salvaged from an alley, found through craigslist months ago. They had a lot of cool things going on inside them. These were definitely perfect finds. The poplar panels, when cut into the 4 pieces I needed yielded about 3/8” of leftovers from the end, and the 1”x3” maple, first cut to the 4 30” stiles lengths, and then the 6 7-3/8” rails lengths, yielded a final cut-off scrap piece of about 1/16”, which promptly got sucked into the saw and was torn apart. NO SCRAP. How serendipitous.

Here’s the general idea. I only have the top rail properly grooved and tenoned at this point.

This marks my very first attempts at a real frame and panel door. I’ve made some larger doors in similar ways with recessed panels, but never with the tongue-and-groove work, too. It was 2×4 stuff, with pocket hole screws for joinery.

The diagonal rail shooting in from frame right here is done; the rest need the other sides of their tenons rabbeted away. My apologies if I’m mangling any jargon here :)

Once again I find myself at that tense moment… preparing for the glue-up. I always have to talk myself into proceeding at these points. Glue-ups are tense, fast work. I’m too laid back for that :) I’m using Titebond II, which I’m preferring more and more over Titebond III.

I’ll leave you for now with that as a cliffhanger. Sorry! Back soon to post how the doors came out.

-- Gary, Los Angeles, video game animator