FLW Cabinet - #22 Finishing the Shelves Part 2 & Tops Part 1

Before I get into more work on the shelves the week before last, we went on a little vacation to visit my son in Arkansas.  While there he bought me a 3-piece wood rasp set.  One round, one half-round and one flat.  The half round and the flat did not have a “safe edge” on them.  That’s where one of the narrow side edges is smooth.  I used one of these when working on the inside roundovers on the doors in Post 21.  As an aside to the cabinet project the following is how I put a safe edge on the new rasps.  The top photo below shows how the rasp looked when I got it while the bottom one shows it after the modification.

To remove the teeth from the rasp a grinder is used.  Here you can see how a riser block is clamped to the tool rest so the rasp handle clears its edge.  The tool rest angle is set so the center line of the rasp is aligned with the center of the wheel.  Several light passes removed the teeth but still left a rough surface. 

Polishing the ground surface is done with wet/dry silicon carbide sandpaper, water as a lubricant plus a backer board.  After clamping the rasp in the vice I start with 320 grit using progressively finer grits stopping at 1200 grit paper.  If you think sanding wood can be tedious try hand sanding hardened steel.

With that done I can get back to working on the shelves.

The last step before gluing the edging on is to route a roundover on a couple of the edges.  I have to do it now as after it is glued on there is not room for the bit to clear.  Don’t worry if this does not make sense right now as I will take a photo after the edging is applied to explain it.  Here is the router table setup.  I have already routed the top edge and am ready to start the bottom edge. 

The last thing that needs to be done to the edging is sanding.  They have been taken to 150 grit on the thickness sander but now I am going to finish up with 220 grit.  I start with the flat surfaces and to minimize any rounding due to rocking the sander I do two edge strips spread apart like this.  After the edges I hand sand the roundover smoothing them and blending the arc in as needed.

With the edging ready to go it can be attached to the shelves. Normally for this type of edging the thin pin nails are used to hold the pieces in place until the glue cures.  They are so small they all but disappear in the oak grain.  However, my pin nailer maxes out at 1” long pins and that’s not long enough to hold these pieces in place.  I could use a nail gun that uses larger nails but they are too big to hide.  That means it’s time to drag out a whole arm load of clamps to hold the edging in place while gluing.  As the edging is longer than the finished shelves and the shelf blanks are longer still, I don’t have to worry about matching the end up perfectly.  Close will do fine then when the glue has cured the shelves and edging can be cut to finished length at the same time for a perfect match.  Here’s what it looks like with the back edging is glued on couple shelves.  One note on positioning, the edging is set ever so slightly proud of the plywood shelf.  That’s because the plywood veneer is so thin if it’s higher than the edging odds are you will go through it before the surfaces are even.  Once cured the edging will be brought down flush with the plywood.  As you can see in the photo it takes a lot of clamps (7 per shelf) to hold the edging in its proper position relative to the plywood panel.  That means it takes all 14 of my clamps this size to put one side of edging on two panels so it’s going to take six days to get all the edging glued on.

After the glue cures the shelf is clamped down and a scraper is used to bring the edging flush.

Next is to route a roundover on the edging.  That’s not done earlier because when I scrape the edging some of the roundover will also be removed requiring it to be routed again.

At the beginning of this post I talked about routing some of the oak edging edges before gluing it on.  Here’s the photo that shows why.  There is just not enough clearance between the shelf and the top of the edging for the router bit to work.  The black part below the bearing hits the plywood preventing the cut from being made.

Once all the edging has been applied, leveled and routed they are ready to be cut to the final length.  That’s done with the wide panel cutting sled on the table saw because the shelves are too wide to use the chop saw.  Process is to trim the edging and plywood flush on one end then flip and cut to final length.  The top photo shows the setup for the initial trim and the bottom the final cut to length.

Since I don’t have to have an absolute exact match on shelf length, I can use a pencil mark on the sled for reference.  The mark is on a piece of masking tape so after all the shelves are cut the tape can be removed so the sled doesn’t end up with a whole bunch of marks on it potentially leading to the wrong one being used. 

A little hand sanding to break the cut edges completes the shelf.  Here is one in place in the cabinet.

While waiting for the glue-up of the last of the shelf edging to cure, I started doing some work on the tops.  Back in Post 13 the blanks were completed and set aside until now.  Fortunately, they have remained flat and true. 

With good flat and true blanks I started laying out the bevel that will wrap around both sides and the front.  The back will remain square.  Below are the renderings and my layout marks.  The angle works out to be about 29 degrees and is not going to be easy to do.  It would be easy if the table saw could tilt to 61 degrees but it does not go that far.  I have made cuts like this before on the bandsaw with much smaller pieces.  This one is 17” wide by 40” long by 1¼” thick and weighs 25+ pounds.  That’s a lot of oak to balance on an edge that after the cut is going to only be about 3/8” wide.

After some thought I pulled out my tapering jig.  It consists of three basic pieces: an adjustable fence that sets the taper angle and gets bolted to the base all of which slide under a hold-down that gets clamped to the table saw rip fence.   The top photo shows the jig set up on the table saw while the bottom photo is a closeup view of the hold-down, jig base and the table saw rip fence.

My plan is to remove the adjustable fence and, in its place, bolt a tall fence that the top will be clamped to.  With the top held firmly in place the blade can be tilted 29 degrees and the whole assembly run through the saw while the hold-down keeps everything aligned.  At least that’s the plan.

Next up – Building Tall Fence Sled plus Finishing & Installing the Tops

FLW Cabinet - #21 Routed Door Edges, Installing the Side Spacers, Shelves Part 1

Next is to take the door back off the cabinet so the edges can be routed like the legs were in Post #16.  Here the door is clamped to the workbench ready for the 1/16” radius roundover to be routed.

The routing works well with the outside edges but the inside corner on the face of the door leaves a little problem in the corner.  As the router bit is a spinning bit it does not cut all the way into the corner but leaves a little bit of a tapered edge on each side and I don’t like that.  Here you can see what I mean.

What I want to end up with is a nice sharp intersection between the two pieces.  To get there requires a few steps.  To start a 45-degree line representing the intersection plane is marked like this.

Following that a fine-toothed rasp with a “safe edge” is used to round over the little tapered edges so they match the radius cut with the router.  A safe edge rasp is one that has a smooth edge or one edge with no teeth.  That way when you can use it up against another reference surface without removing material.  Below is the rasp and the rounded over edge.  Note that there is still a tiny bit of material needing to be removed at the corner itself.

Last is to use a sharp chisel to pare off the remaining nubbin which creates a nice sharp intersection of the two radiused edges.  Some very minor sanding smooths the radiused edge.  It sounds like a lot to go through but in reality, it takes longer to read how it’s done than to do it.  The photo shows the chisel I use and the completed inside corner.

Attaching side spacers is next.  There are three different profiles one for the top, one for the bottom and two identical ones in-between.  Here is what they look like in the drawings.

In Post #16 Making the Side Spacers, More Stain &Front Frame Glue-up they were all finished except for being left about 1/16” long.  Now with the cabinet assembled I can cut them to fit.  To do that I set up a couple of stops on the chop saw.  The one on the right cuts the piece 1/32” too long and it is used first.

The stop on the left cuts off another 1/32” leaving a piece the same width as the side panel.  Cutting equal amounts from both sides keeps the profile centered.  This gets me really close but due to very minor variances in width some of the pieces needed a little more shaved off.

Gluing the pieces in is next.  The top spacers are easy, a couple of bar clamps takes care of them.  The two intermediate spacers are not so easy.  First, a caul is used to spread the clamping force across the full width of the spacer.  A bar clamp across the back applies pressure to one end of the caul.  The front needs a little different clamping setup since there is no plywood panel here to resist the tendency of the legs to bow inward when the clamp is tightened.  Individual deep reach clamps and spacers allow the clamp to stand off the leg and the door while clamping the spacer to the side.   The bottom image is a closer look at the intermediate clamp setup with the caul. 

When all done this is what they look like.

The shelves are next.  Back in post #15 Stain Samples, Cutting ¾” 4’x8’ Plywood Sheets &Testing I made a change in the plywood side width to add about half an inch in depth to the cabinet.  I don’t regret the change but it did come with a cost.  As the sides and the shelves are cut from the same piece if one gets bigger (sides) the other gets smaller (shelves).  That means the shelves are not wide enough to just need cutting to length to be completed.  An oak spacer will have to be added to both the front and back to pick up the needed width.  That’s not a real problem as at a minimum I needed to add a facing to cover up the raw plywood edge.  Also, since the shelves are about 33” long I want to add a little reinforcing to them so they don’t sag.  I think what I will do is add a roughly ¾” wide by 1”to 1 ¼” tall piece at both the front and back.  These are the two options for locating them.  Right now I am leaning toward the one at the top.  That’s because the little lip at the top will help keep things from sliding off the back and falling to the bottom of the cabinet.  It also makes the shelves reversible if that is ever needed.

Sorting through the cabinet’s cutoff pieces for the spacers I found that the tapered scraps from the legs will give me about 8 of the needed 12.  The photo below is from when I was cutting the leg tapers.  Other pieces from the rough cutting rails and tops gave me the remainder. 

True to form for this batch of oak most of the pieces had warped a bit.  Heck some were even warped in two planes, but fortunately no twist.  In short, I had a dozen warped, non-square pieces including some that still had the rough sawn edge.  Well, it took me the better part of an entire morning to straighten and square them.  At this point I did not try to take them to the same size, the goal is to just get them straight and square.  Now, before going any further they are going to set for a day or so to see if they are stable.

After letting them set all are good except for about three that had developed a tiny curve.  Nothing that when gluing up could not be resolved but as the pieces were oversized, I went ahead and straightened them again.  Here are the pieces cut the finished height of just under 1 ¼”.  Widths still vary and that’s next.

Cutting to width is next.  The pieces at the front of the shelf are just a bit thicker than the ones at the back.  I just thought a wider piece at the front would look better than having both the same thickness.  Last step is to run all four faces of the pieces through the thickness sander to remove the saw marks.  Here they are sized to height and thickness.  All are still about an inch long.  A few have a few chalked “X” on the left end and that’s to note which end needs to have the most cut off due to flaws needing to be removed.

Next up – Finishing the Shelves & Tops Part 1

FLW Cabinet - #20 Plywood Void, Door Spacer, Fitting Door & Mounting Hinges

Starting on the second cabinet right off I ran into a small problem.  The top corner of both of the plywood sides have a small void, the only ones I have come across.  Most of the time that would not really be a problem except in this case they are right at the point where the top screw will get run in.  That’s a potential problem because with the screw that close to the edge of the void it could split the plywood.

My solution is to add a temporary end cap then fill the void with epoxy as shown in the left photo.  Once the epoxy cures the temporary end cap is removed and the epoxy sanded flush.  The right photo shows the finished patch.

From this point the assembly process is just like the first cabinet.  Here are both of them assembled plus the one on the right has the door clamped in place for a test fit.  The primary item here is to make sure the door fits squarely in the opening.  Fortunately, it fits very well which is a relief.

Because the door is inset, I need to have a spacer between the door and the legs.  One side is for the hinges and the other side is for symmetry.  The hinge side has two purposes.  First, is for clearance at the knuckle that surrounds the hinge pin.  The drawing below shows what I mean.

Second, is to provide additional offset for the hinge so it is a little farther away from the leg allowing the door to open wider without the door frame hitting the leg.

Some time ago I had cut blanks to be used for these spacers and set them aside.  Unfortunately, over time they had curved enough that they were unusable.  The good news is once they are cut down, I have a whole bunch of nice oak paint stirrers. 😊 After cutting new spacers to the correct thickness I ripped them down to the required width.  Because the pieces are fairly thin at just a little over 3/16” thick a hold-down is used to keep the piece tight to the saw table which minimizes any blade induced chatter or vibration.  Here is what that looks like.

Next is to put a 1/16” radius on spacers using the router.  After clamping the door in place to check the fit they were removed, sanded then glued and pin nailed in place.  Lastly because the spacers are so thin a caul is clamped on them to provide pressure all along the piece.  In this case the caul is just a piece of thicker wood used to spread the pressure of clamps so not as many are needed.

Here is a close look at the installed spacer after the glue cured and the caul removed.  There are two of the pin nails in the photo and to make them easily visible they are circled in red.

Using pin nails to hold pieces like the spacer in place until the glue sets work very well and are virtually invisible.  That’s because they have no head and are very thin.  For this application I used pins that are 5/8” long and 23 gauge or just over .02” in diameter.   Below is a photo of a single pin and a stick of them along with part of a 6” ruler.

Mounting the hinges comes next.  Because of the door size I decided to use four hinges on each door.  After experimenting with different spacing I settled on what “looked” right.  The process behind the spacing started with placing the top hinge close enough to the top to provide support for the corner joint and to minimize any twist on the vertical piece plus it had to look like it’s in the right place.  The bottom hinge is next set just a little farther from the end than the top hinge.  That’s so visually there will be more weight at the bottom and the door won’t look top heavy.  It’s not a lot, just about 10% of the top hinge distance.  Once again it has to look right.  The other two hinges are evenly spaced between the top and bottom.  The left photo is what I ended up with while the right is a closeup showing the pencil alignment mark.

With the hinges located, I set the door in the adjustable panel clamp on my workbench then taped the hinges in place.   Having the door at a convenient working height makes things easier.  

The hinge is clamped in place so it does not shift and will be tight to the door after the screws are installed.  Using a self-centering drill bit in the slotted hole marked is so a pilot hole of the appropriate size can be drilled.  Here is what that looks like along with the self-centering drill bit.

Below is a closer view showing one of the holes marked.

After the pilot hole is drilled a single screw is run into one of the hinges slotted holes.  That leaves me room for adjustment later on.  An old maxim comes into play here, “If you can’t make it perfect, make it adjustable.”  Here is the top hinge in place.  Note that the screw does not match the hinge.  That’s because I have twisted off the hinge supplied screws before and don’t want a repeat of that so a higher quality e.g. stronger screw the same size as the final one is used until the final hinge install.

The door is then clamped in place along with the hinges and a single screw is installed through each hinge into the leg.  Here a photo showing what the clamping setup looks like.   

After the screws are installed and the clamps removed the door is checked for a consistent even gap at the non-hinge side plus the top and bottom.  Top and bottom spacing is easily adjust by loosening the hinge screws and sliding the door up or down.  However, the gap at the non-hinge side was not quite right.  At the very top and bottom corners the gap narrowed slightly, less than 1/16” but enough that it needed correcting.  The fix is to use take a scrap the thickness of the desired gap then used to mark a cut line on the door.

After marking the door is removed and put back in the workbench adjustable panel clamp.  Once securely in place hand planes and sanding blocks are used to trim the door edge. 

When done the door is reinstalled back into the cabinet, here it is open.

The same process is followed for the other door.

Next up – Routed Door Edges, Installing the Spacers, Shelves Part 1