Projects & Related Things: FLW Cabinet

Before I start working on making all the pegs I decided to see how the door frame would look set on the grouted window. It fit just fine and the stain color goes well with the glass. After looking at the backside on how the window set in the door I made a decision on exactly what type of retainers and got them ordered. The install will be covered later.

Here is a section drawing showing how the pegs will fit in their holes in the legs. Only ¼” of the exposed end will be stained and finished. The rest is left raw for good glue adhesion.

First up on the pegs is to make the blanks they will be cut from. All told the 64 pegs that go in the ½” square holes will require about 5 ½ feet of material. To that I need to add some extras for ones with flaws, the saw kerfs and waste when the individual pieces get too small to handle. All that adds up to about 4’ or in total 9 ½’ so I made 10 ½ feet. It’s way easier to make extra as long as the equipment is set up versus going back and making a 12” piece because you were a few pegs short.

The blanks are made from leftovers saved during the build process. They get ripped to about 1/16” oversize on the table saw then gradually reduced down using the thickness sander. The mortise machine makes ½” square holes that are really .497” and to get the pegs installed they need to be a little undersized. In this case a little is 2 thousandths of an inch or less than a sheet of typing paper. Anyway, here are what the blanks look like ready to be turned into pegs.

The process starts by beveling the end of the blank at a 45-degree angle. A disk sander is used to rough them out. This shows the fence setup which gives me a consistent angle.

The problem with the disk sander is the disk itself is pretty coarse, like 60 grit coarse. To smooth the surface out a 220-grit random orbital sander sheet is set against the disk. The disk is rotated back and forth by hand maintaining the angle and smoothing the beveled facets.

Just in case I overshoot the size of the facets making them too big and need to remove a bit from the end of the blank a temporary fence is clamped to the disk sander to hold the blank at 90 degrees to the disk.

Here is what a finished beveled end looks like ready to be cut to length. Since I have not come up with a good way to add a stop to control the size of the bevels they are all done by eye comparing each one to the original master sample.

Cutting the pegs to length is done with a fine-tooth cutoff blade on the table saw. A stop block sets the peg length and a backer board minimizes blowout when the blade exits the cut.

Before staining I need to mask the end of the peg off to keep it clean. Since there is not a lot of leeway in where the masking tape goes a line is added for reference using an adjustable square. If you look closely, you can see it on the peg.

To help get the peg started in the hole the heel of the peg has a little taper added by making a pass across some 80-grit sandpaper clamped to the saw extension and ta-da one peg ready have masking tape applied then stained. Getting everything set up to do the 70-piece production run took a while so the first peg took about three hours to do.

However, once I got into a rhythm working to make groups of 10 it only took a little over 90 seconds per peg. Here are what all the pegs look like ready to stain. There are two sizes 1/2" and 3/8", the majority are the ones that go in the legs and others are for the doors.

The first coat of stain went on pretty quick (top photo), now I just need to let it dry before adding the gel stain (bottom photo). Because the smaller pegs are so little, I had to hold them with the needle nose pliers to apply the gel stain then wipe it off.

Applying the lacquer is next and presents a bit of a problem. If I lined up the pegs similar to when they were stained then made a pass with the small airbrush the air blast would blow them all over the place. Not exactly conducive to getting a quality finish. To hold them securely in place I plan to set them in a sacrificial mortise and then spray. The mortises will be cut in the plywood scraps using the mortising machine to cut the holes. Here is what the mortising machine looks like set up.

Here are most of the pieces needed. After I took this photo, I counted the number of holes and was short about 30 so made some more.

To get ready to spray lacquer on the pegs the blue masking tape needs to be removed and the pegs pressed into the plywood holders. The depth is controlled using a simple spacer then a scrap piece of plywood is used to push the peg flush with the top of the spacer. The photo below shows the progression from taped peg to one pressed in ready to be sprayed.