Tonight I finished up the top, added a couple feet to the base, tacked on the rear panel, and finally constructed the doors.

The raised panel bits that I had picked up a while ago that are used to create the stiles and rails worked out really well… The panel bit however caused me some grief. It simply was too large for my router table and even the router’s face plate. Against my better judgement I hand routed the panels, without the router’s face plate, but just taking off a little bit at a time. It took a while, but in the end seemed to work out well.

I screwed up royally too… I cut the stiles to the wrong length (somehow missing that, even when I checked them prior to routing) and went through the whole process of routing all four of them before I realized they were too short. I couldn’t figure out what I had done, until I realized I simply read the wrong measurement off my papers. Dummy.

One of the doors:

Now it’s finally looking like something:

Since the family is away for a few days I’ll be able to spend some time in the garage and finish up construction of the cabinet. This evening I worked on the drawer. It ended up being a bit deeper than I thought, which is a good thing. I was afraid it was going to end up too shallow and unusable.

Assembly was pretty straightforward. I think the trickiest part was figuring out how to create a set of guide rails so that it 1) had something to rest on and 2) wouldn’t tip when you pulled it out. And here’s what I came up with:

This week’s progress on the cabinet includes trimming out the left and right sides of the carcass and creating the face frame.

For the trim on the sides, I ran my 1×2’s through the router to give them a simple Roman Ogee design and then mitered the corners.

I ended up cutting a series of half lap and cross lap joints to bring together the 1×3 and and 1×2 boards for the face frame. I’ve never attempted this before, but it seems to have come out pretty nice. The glue up is still in progress for this:

This weekend I started work on the buffet cabinet. I focused primarily on the carcass and was able to get it pretty close to completion. The top front and rear rails were joined to the sides with some biscuits, while the drawer support in the front and the fixed shelf down towards the bottom half are set inside of stopped dados - both sets of these dados were a bit of challenge. The ones for the shelf were fine, but I made the mistake of not turning the sides around to cut the set needed for the drawer support. Before I realized what had happened it was already too late - there’s now an extra set of unnecessary dados cut into the sides, towards the back of the carcass. I’ll probably leave them alone, since they’re out of sight and sit behind where the drawer will be. If I feel inclined, I could probably cut out a couple filler pieces and glue them in place.

The other flub I made was when I routed out the V grooves in the sides. I had the depth of the bit too far out from the base of the router and because it was trying to cut such a deep groove, it ended up burning the wood a little. I didn’t like how deep it was, so since I’m going to be painting this portion of the cabinet anyway, I just filled it back up with some puddy. I reset the depth of the bit and was able to make a lot cleaner cuts on both sides. They give the plywood the look of being paneled, which is exactly what I was trying to accomplish.

Oh, and the new pipe clamps are working out well.

Back sometime during the holidays I purchased a set of pipe clamp fixtures to use on the larger projects that I want to take on. They’d be perfect on this buffet project. I’ve never gotten around to getting the actual pipes until this weekend, and the reason I purchased these particular clamps was mainly because of their price - Let’s just say I should’ve known better…

The clamps call for a 3/4″ pipe with an O.D. of 1.0625 (that’s an outside diameter of no greater than 1 1/16″). So yesterday I picked up two 10′ sections that matched the exact specs, and were threaded at both ends, and had the guy at HD cut them in half for me. I figured 5′  lengths should suffice. I brought them home and proceeded to attached the fixtures. Turns out that the inside diameter of each of the clutch discs was exactly the same size as the pipe - not even remotely allowing them to fit over the pipes. I went back to Rockler’s website to see if I could find any information that might help me out and I happen to click on the ‘Reviews‘ tab - to my unpleasant surprise I come to find that just about everyone who’s purchased these silly things has had the exact same problem. Now mind you - these reviews didn’t exist when I bought these clamps - had I seen them back then, you can definitely be sure I wouldn’t have made the purchase.

I knew that the clutch rings needed to be grinded down just a hair, but didn’t really have anything that could do the job. I thought maybe something like a small grinding stone that you can get for one of those Dremel tools would work, so this afternoon I picked up both a small rotary file and grinding stone bit that I could use in my drill. Using the file to get the initial material off first first, then following it up with the grinding stone, worked like a charm. It took me about an hour to do though because there were 16 of them and there was a lot of grinding and checking for fit, grinding some more, and checking some more… After all that, I was finally able to attach the fixtures without any issue. I reversed the position of the clutches too, because they seemed to work better when inserted opposite the way they came packaged.

This afternoon I spent some time thinking about the cabinet and came up with a rough idea of how I want to approach it. What that usually means is that I either bust out the graph paper, start drafting, and making note of precise measurements or… jot down some chicken scratch numbers and sketch out what I want the thing to look like. In this case I went with the latter and came up with this:

It’s fairly straightforward and combines a few different ideas I got out of the decorating catalogues we get. Overall dimensions will be apx. 36″H x 42″W x 14″D (inside depth). The main cabinet carcass and facade will be painted an earthy green color and the top will be stained a shade of oak. Even though I’m going to paint most of it, I’m going to attempt to use as few mechanical fasteners as I can, and stick with traditional joinery and glue, just to try and challenge myself a bit. I used biscuit joints on my last cabinet’s face frame for example, but then nailed it to the carcass with brads. I’ll try to use the biscuits in this case again, but I may have to combine that with using lap joints to join the 1×2 rails with the 1×3’s stiles and mid-stile. Either that or possibly do a series of through mortiseses and tenons - I’m just not sure about doing that on such narrow stock.

In continuing my efforts to try and get a process down for creating these raised panels, I ran two tests through my table saw again tonight. I first ran a scrap 2×4 through my dado blade to get a notch that cleared the blade. Then I clamped it down, perpendicular to the blade so that it could act as a guide for the boards.

I left the dado on for this the first test run, thinking that the wider cut might help - I wasn’t impressed. It was a bit difficult to run the board through, but I may have been a bit overzealous in trying to cut too much material out on my first pass.

I removed everything, including the dado, and put back my normal blade. I reset the guide and clamped it down.

This time I started off with a shallower cut and ran another test board through. I did a 2nd pass on all four sides after raising the blade a bit more and that seemed to give me decent results.

A little sanding on the slopes and these should look nice.  At the same though, I’m not too fond of the tension that seems to be on the blade when hitting it perpendicular like this. I’m hitting the blade on the back side and I’m wondering if I reverse the blade if it would make the cut a bit smoother - perhaps another test is in order…

I’ve decided to create a buffet-style cabinet for our dining room.

As part of the build, I want to try my hand at making raised panel doors. It seems the easiest way to do so is to router them out with a set of door construction bits. These sets usually come with at least three bits - two to create the stiles and rails, and one to create the panel. I still have to do a little more research to find out if my router has enough horsepower to run the larger of the three bits.

I dug through some woodworking plans I have in pdf and came across a couple articles that show how to make very simple raised panels with the use of your table saw as well. I tried the one method of running the board on its end, with the saw blade set at an angle. I didn’t like the way it turned out - it just wasn’t steady enough to make a clean cut. Another method I came across last night here, has you running the board perpendicular to the blade to create a concave shaped cut. I’ll try this method tonight and see what happens.