Last year I bought a half kitchen with the idea that I would add the cabinets to my workshop and give it an upgraded feel. (Right now everything is gray melamine which I got from an office that was being torn down.) When my wife saw that I was going to use the cabinets in my shop she immediately said they are too nice to get beat up in the shop. Too nice is a relative term. Let's take a look.
Here is an example of one of the cabinets.
Here it is from different angle.
These are Kitchen Craft cabinets and I would consider them a good quality cabinet. From the surface they look great but let's take a closer look.
Dovetails are the hallmark of good cabinet making and they are used here.
But it's obvious that they are machine cut.
How are things held together? Let's take a look.
and let's not forget this one too.
I do have to say that cabinet fronts are all wood and the soft close drawer sliders are really nice. However, there isn't much else to the cabinet.
Considering my wife was balking at letting me put the cabinets in the shop (even though I bought them specifically for this purpose), I thought I would give making cabinets based on this design a try. The goal WASN'T to make furniture quality cabinets but to see if I could build something of equal or slight better quality WITHOUT spending a lot of money or time making them. More specifically, I had just bought a 12" Sliding Miter Saw and I wanted build cabinets specifically for this.
This series is designed to show you what I came up with.
I started with taking measurements of the initial cabinet and combining that with measurements taken from the miter saw itself. With these numbers in hand I created a basic plan in Google Sketchup. Usually I put together a rough drawing and some basic numbers and then I'm off to the races. This usually means I am constantly "planning" throughout the whole build. Learning to use Sketchup is helping me get away from this. I have also made drawings at full scale to see how things will look and to plan the joinery accordingly. Here's the beginning Sketchup drawing.
After I started drawing it out, I decided I wanted to make the main cabinet mobile so I changed methods and used a story stick for each cabinet.
With plans in hand, I could start to think about material. Initially the plans called for using 1/2" White Melamine. When I got the wood store I noticed they were having a sale on 3/4" shop grade birch plywood. As it was slightly cheaper and I though I might stain it, I decided to buy several boards of it. Two boards I had cut into four pieces and the other two into 3 pieces. While I have all of the tools to cut 4×8 sheets, I hate doing it so I always pay the little extra to have them cut the boards into more manageable pieces.
So how should I put the boards together to make the initial cases? In the past I have used the Kreg Jig but things have a way of shifting ever so slightly when I use it. I could use dadoes but I really didn't want to spend time clamping things up. I thought of using my Festool Domino but I still wasn't having the level of success with it that I wanted. In the end, I decided to use a combination of the Kreg Jig and the Dowelmax. Using dowels would let me get the references I required and the Kreg Jig would hopefully eliminate the clamps.
While the dowels did a good job referencing everything, not all of the screws held well in the plywood so I ended up using clamps anyway.
A note of the Dowelmax…I love it! It's really easy to use and once you get used to the various configurations, it's really easy to get what you want. I have all of the usual joinery tools including the Festool Domino and I continue to go back to this jig. It's not cheap but it's totally worth it.
I haven't had any problems with the Kreg, but I use their right angle clamp when screwing things down. I clamp tight, check alignment, start the screw, recheck alignment (though only once or twice have I actually noticed any movement), and then finish the screw. If you're using the Kreg a lot, I'd highly recommend it for cabinet work.
Up to now, things were relatively easy. Now the actual work was going to start. To make the drawers, I decided to use Poplar. However, I did something I would now change. I purchased 4/4 of the stuff with the idea that I would resaw in half on my bandsaw. In retrospect, I should have purchased 8/4 and cut it into thirds. After resawing, planing and sanding, the boards were much thinner than I had hoped.
The next decision was how to construct the drawers themselves. I have an Akeda Dovetail Jig and using it would have been the obvious choice. However, I was always fascinated by Drawer Lock Bits and thought this project was a good opportunity to give them a try. I promptly went down to Lee Valley Tools and bought the Small Drawer Lock Bit.
As with most things, there was a certain amount of setup to get the optimum fitting but once done, things went very quickly. I do have to have to say there was a massive amount of tear out when doing the side pieces. Here's an example.
Ideally I should have created a Zero Clearance board for this bit but one thing that helped was creating a scribe line and then doing the cut. I know what you're thinking…the cut looks like crap. Yes it does. But all the tear out is on the inside of the joint so with a little sanding, you never see it. And did I mention this joint is fast?
Here's what it looks like when you pull it together.
Once again, I tried to get away from clamping by using my pin nailer.
And once again, I ended up using clamps. I only used the pin nailer on the front and the back where it wouldn't be seen.
After completing the drawer joints, I used a dado blade to make the 1/4" cut for the drawer bottoms.
In the past, I had always used a 1/4" router bit to make this cut thinking it was going to be painful to take the blade out of the tablesaw and then try to get the dado blade to make an accurate cut. This is simply not true. I have the Freud SD608 which is incredibly easy to setup. The cuts were far superior then those that I had made in the past. I have used this dado set quite a lot for this project and it's been excellent.
Making the drawer fronts was similar to making the drawers themselves. The actual construction of the fronts was not overly hard but there was a lot of repetition in terms of milling the wood. The one thing I could have done to improve the overall construction was mill the wood close and then let it acclimate it a bit more.
Here's a picture of the drawer fronts on one cabinet
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