project: under [garage] door shelving cabinet #5: and now, some doors

When we last left off, I was about to glue up the first cabinet door. Here it is clamped and drying:

Here’s a detail (the wet marks at the left are just from wiping out glue – they dried up and disappeared):

And because time-lapse videos are so fun, here’s the glue-up of the second door:

And now the finished doors. Well… finished gluing together. Now there’s still sanding and coats of whatever I decide to use. I’ve been thinking of dewaxed shellac with topcoat of maybe something like spar urethane, but I’m not 100% sold on it. This is how I’ve been intending them to be hung, with the darker panel regions framing in the lighter regions:

But of course, now I had to check other alignments. Rolling these over, I get a sensation of peering through a fog-filled slot canyon, with a small, dark, foreground spire to the right. I also like having the heavy stile details in the lower right. It puts the weight at the bottom, and feels more balanced. Still, I’m not 100% sold on this orientation.

This is how the inside would look if you closed the doors on the first image above and looked at it from inside out. The boards are pretty on both sides. I like the busy nature of the rails and stiles on this side, but didn’t like the blotchy discolorations in some areas, so they became the inside. The panels are set closer to the back, so from this side, they’re closer to the fronts of the rails and stiles. I did this on purpose, as I did with the other doors I made for my storage shed. I like deep-set panels.

Swapping the upside-down doors (2nd image above) left to right, to put the dark regions in the middle, I have to say I don’t like them this way. It feels like a tree or pole is in my face in the middle, blocking an otherwise lightly-colored cabinet from view. I can imagine this working sometimes, but in this case, I want the light in the middle, blooming out through the darkness.

I wanted to bevel the inner edges of the rails and stiles, as they’re a bit blocky being this deep, but didn’t trust my ability to line everything up pre-gluing, especially with no other stock like this, and no access to more of it. I had thought of clamping the rails and stiles tightly together from below with K-Body clamps, so they didn’t stick up above the top, and then using the laminate trimmer and a following bit to do the bevels. Then I’d unclamp, add in the panels, and do the glue-up again, but I decided to skip that. I just wanted to get the doors done. I often switch ideas mid-stream, and projects balloon from a few days to a few months. I was afraid to have this linger.

Now that they’re glued up, I don’t think any bearing bit will fit inside the framed sections. They’re not deep enough. Other options I’ve thought of include creating a template to fit around them and letting the bearing hit that, or chiseling for quite awhile, or inventing some kind of beveled chisel holder so I just run it along the corner, and then clean up the corners based on those new flats, sanding (a lot), or lots of scraping. It doesn’t need to be much; 1/4” would probably be fine – just something to break up that hard edge.

I think creating a pattern would be my best bet, provided I can keep from screwing it up and plunging the bit through my nice new panels. Anyone know of any very shallow router bearing setups for such work?

-- Gary, Los Angeles, video game animator