FLW Cabinet - #8 Cutting Peg Holes, Gluing up Doors & Fixing Cracks

With the honed mortising chisel installed in the mortiser the cutting can begin.  Here is how the piece looks after the first cut of four cuts with this setup has been made. 

All told four different setups will be required.  Resetting the machine to make each set of cuts is fairly quick.  Here the second setup is being made with the heel of the square being used to assure the chisel is lined up.  The black rod on the left is the left side stop and has already been set.  Note the spacer filling the mortise.  That’s for backing during the cut to eliminate any blowout on the back side of the cut.  The third and fourth setups are done in quick succession to finish this work.

One bit of work on the table saw remains and that is to rip the stiles to their final width which will get rid of the little bit of chip out on the tenons.  After that all that remains before gluing up the doors is to drill and countersink where the screws will go through the tenon into the sides of the mortise.  Here is that setup on the drill press.  The penciled in squares are where I traced the mortised holes onto the tenons while the door was clamped up checking for squareness.  The countersink bit’s depth is controlled by a stop set on the drill press while the spacer backs up the tenon being drilled.

Glue-up of the first door is next.  Generally gluing an assembly almost always seems to me like a mad rush.  Here I am using Titebond III waterproof glue.  Not because I need a waterproof joint but because it gives me a working time of 8-10 minutes versus 4-6 for Titebond Original and every little bit helps.  It’s spread the glue, assemble the pieces, put on eight clamps, check diagonals to make sure the door is square, adjust as necessary and last wipe off any glue squeeze out.

After an overnight curing of the glue the clamps are removed and some sanding is done to get rid of the raised grain caused when I was wiping off the glue squeeze out with a wet cloth.  Below is a typical photo of the completed bridal joint.  The doors as set aside for now but will be referenced soon as they will now drive the measurements of the rest of the piece.

Next up is to do some more work on the legs.  They have been setting for a while and in checking all but three are straight and square.  The one blank that twisted when cutting the taper has relaxed and while it still has a bit of twist it’s not insurmountable.   The other two have only minor problems that should not be hard to work around.  However, two of them while straight and square have some substantial problems that need to be addressed.  This photo is from the third post Making & Using the Taper Jig that shows my two problem children.  The bottom piece’s flaw showed up while I was surfacing the planks.  For now, I plan on filling it in with black epoxy.  The third piece from the bottom has three cracks that showed up when I ripped the taper. 

Here is a closer look at the piece with the three cracks, it is the one I am going to work on first.  The center crack is the biggest most difficult to take care of as it wraps around the piece and is visible from three sides. 

Doing some poking and prodding I found that the faces of the center crack have some flexibility which will allow me to glue and clamp them closed.  The large crack on the edge would not close cleanly and the end ones would not budge at all so they will need a different repair.  The problem is how to get glue deep into the crack so it can be securely glued together.  My solution is to run a bead of glue on the top then use the shop vac pull the glue all the way through to the other face.  When clamped the glue squeezed out at the joint on all three sides confirming that it had gotten all the way through.

Once the glue cured, I took off the clamps and sanded the faces smooth.  Below you can see how the face cracks disappeared but the split on the top is still pretty ugly.

For the remaining cracks I plan on routing the flaw out and patching using a method similar to what was done on the door.   To start a line is drawn down through the center of the crack.  This represents the center of the channel to be routed.  Since the cracks are not very wide a ¼” bit in a hand held router will be used.  Next is to cut a spacer that equals the distance from the router edge to the centerline of the bit.   One edge is set on the pencil center line and a fence is clamped in place on the other side.  This will assure the center of the bit follows the pencil line and makes a straight cut.  One pass and the slot for the patch is cut.

In order for the patch to truly blend the optimal solution is to cut if from a piece adjacent to where it’s needed.  In this case the taper cutoff from this piece is going to be the perfect donor.  Because the slots are at an angle the patches need to be cut at an equal angle so the grain matches up.  After some careful layout with an adjustable angle gauge and a scale I have the three patches marked.  Shown below is the cut slots and the patches marked with chalk.

With the layout done I use the table saw to cut a blank off about 1/16” thicker than the dept of the slot then rough cut the patches about 3/32” wider than the final width using the bandsaw.

The final fitting of the patches is done using a 12” disk sander and a dial caliper shown in the top photo to sneak up on the finish width.  When the patch fits the top face is sanded down so it is just a little thicker than the slot is deep.  The bottom photo shows the patches set in place ready to glue.

After that the patches are glued and clamped in place.  Once the glue cures the patch is brought down flush using a hand plane, scraper and sandpaper.   This shows the nearly invisible finished patches; the chalk marks show where the patches start and finish.

With the patches done the last bit of preparation work is to remove the saw marks from when I cut the taper on the legs.  In the photo below I have chalked the edge to show the saw marks and rather than sanding the surface smooth I used a card scraper.  It is just a piece of steel with a burr on the edge.  The sharp burr cuts paper thin shavings off and will flatten the face in nothing flat as shown in the bottom photo.

Next up – More Leg Problems, Cutting Mortises & Peg Holes

FLW Cabinet - #7 Door Joints Part 2 & a Patch

Once the saw was ready, I wanted to guarantee that I made the cut on the correct side as I sure didn’t want to get this far into making the door and trash out a piece.  The method for preventing that is simple.  Set all the stiles together and using chalk mark which face is up when making the cut.

With that done it’s a simple matter of running the pieces through the saw then clamping the stiles and rails together to see if the joints were tight and door frame square.  It was all good, the joints are tight on the front and back plus it was almost perfectly square just clamping it together.  The top photo shows the clamping arrangement.   The bottom left is the backside of the frame while the bottom right is the front.  Also, in the bottom photos note that the tenon sticks out just a little in the front and some of the edges are chipped.  The chipping is a result of the dado blade cutting across the grain even with a sacrificial backup piece.  In this case that won’t be a problem as when I trim the piece to its final width the chips will be cut away.

There is only one problem that needs to be addressed and that is a small defect on the inside near the bottom of the door.  Here is a close view of the problem area.   The fix is to cut in a small patch using a router.

Here everything is setup and ready to go.  The router has a small straight bit in it and a guide to assure the cut is parallel to the edge plus a stop block to make the end of the cut square with the edge.

A couple of passes and here is the result.  A flat bottom recess with straight and square edges except for the back corner.  That little radius is what the round router bit leaves when changing direction.

Using a sharp chisel to square up the corner makes it ready to fit a patch in place.

When cutting the door pieces to their final length I kept the cutoffs with a chalk mark as to which piece they came off of – just in case.  This let me pull out a piece to make the patch that almost perfectly matches the color and grain where it was needed.  The cut-off the patch will come from is about 3” long and the patch itself is just under 1/8” thick.   To cut that thin a piece off that short a blank could be done with a hand saw or the bandsaw.  Since I am a lot better with a bandsaw it’s my choice.  That said I for sure don’t want to get my fingers that close to the blade.  Using a hand screw clamp let me securely hold the piece in place at 90 degrees to the blade with my fingers well away from it.

Once the patch blank was sliced off, I carefully fitted it to the recess working to get tight joints and matching the grain.  Here is the finished patch ready to be glued in.  If you look closely the rough sanding scratches from the disk sander are visible.

A little glue plus clamps hold it down, tight to the right side and tight to the top.

After letting it cure overnight, I removed the clamps and did the final fitting.  Here the patch has been brought down flush with the face of the stile.  The right side has also been trimmed flush with the tenon shoulder.  Last is to trim the edge flush.  So, you can see what’s going on the stile has been rotated 180 degrees with the patch not at the top.  The hand plane shown is a shoulder plane whose blade is a little different in that it runs the full width of the body.  As shown here the plane is on its side resting on the rabbit and trimming the patch.   A few passes and the patch is flush.  The end of the patch is even with the left end of the plane.

Here the patch is all done and I am happy with the way it turned out.  I believe after the finish is applied it will be barely visible besides it’s at the bottom of the door frame on the inside.  For scale reference a 1/16” drill bit is set at the inside corner of the patch.

Next up is the 3/8” square holes for the door pegs.  There are two faux pegs in each corner.  They are not functional pegs but plugs to cover the screws that will be used to reinforce the corner joint.

How does one go about making square holes?  There are a couple of ways, one is to drill a round hole and square it up with a wood chisel and the other is to use a mortiser.  Since I have a mortising machine guess which will be used?  A mortiser combines the cutting of a four-sided chisel and a drill bit in the center to remove most of the material while the chisel assures the edges are straight and clean.  This is what my mortiser looks like all set up ready to go.  The wheels move the bed left/right and in/out while the clamp holds the piece securely in position.  There are stops to locate the piece and control depth so once all are set you can quickly make matching repeat cuts.

To regress a moment before the cutting actually starts, I’m going to take a short side trip.  Not all equipment is fully functional when you get it and the mortiser chisels fall in this category.  Below are a couple of chisels, the one on the top is the way it comes from the factory while the one on the bottom has had some tender loving care and plenty of elbow grease applied.  There are two places where work was done and they make a huge difference.  First, is the finish on the chisel while they were all nicely ground flat and square all the little ridges left over from the factory grind act like little teeth and really hold the chisel in the wood.  The bottom one has been hand-polished to a mirror finish starting with 220 grit silicone-carbide paper working all the way up to 2,000 grit.  An 8,000 grit water stones takes over from there with the final touch being on a buffing wheel charged with polishing rouge.  The second bit of work is the inside of the chisel where the cutting edge is honed with a conical circular 600 diamond grit hone.  NOW, they are ready to use.

Next up – Cutting Peg Holes, Gluing up Doors & Fixing Cracks

FLW Cabinet - #6 Door Joints Part 1

To make a bridal joint with the recess for the glass window and its frame the sequence of cuts needs to be planned out.  Because it’s easier to fit the tenon to the mortise than the other way around that’s where I will start.  Short outline is:

1. Cut the end mortises in the top and bottom rails ¼” wide and 2 ¼” deep.
2. Cut the recess where the glass piece will go.
3. Match tenon thickness in the rails to the mortise in the stiles which should line up with the recess for the glass.  Here is where any variance in the material thickness will require some adjustment.

The mortise is cut with two ¼” stack dado blades like this.  I like to use the stacked dados because I can make the cut in one pass knowing that it will be a ¼” wide and have a flat bottom.

After switching out the rip blade that was on the saw and installing the dado blades next is to set the depth.  Here I got an ugly surprise, my dado blades are 8” in diameter and could not cut a deep enough mortise.  I was a bit over 1/16” short whereupon I directed some nasty words at the blades then moved on to “Plan B”. 

Plan B is to use my rip blade and make multiple passes to get the appropriate width.  To start the blade is set so it is roughly in the center of the rail.  This is the jig I use and what the first cut looks like.  After the first pass the board is rotated 180 degrees and a second pass makes a centered mortise in the board.

This is after the second pass and the gap to the left of the blade shows the offset from center.  Next the jig is moved a bit closer to the blade by loosening a couple of locking levers, making the adjustment, tightening them down then two more passes are made.  This continues until I get the desired mortise width.   You can just see the locking lever immediately to the right of the saw blade.

Once the initial passes were made and the mechanics of the process verified, I cut all the pieces to length using the chop saw and a stop block.  I had rough-cut two of the blanks long enough so that if I blew the first cut I had enough material for a second chance.

The completed cutting results in a mortise with the sides within one thousandth of an inch.  All of the measurements ended up being a little over ¼” as the finished thickness of the door pieces are a shade over ¾”. 

One of the advantages of using a good dado blade set is when making a cut you end up with sharp corners and a nice flat bottom.  Using my rip blade did not give me that result.  Take a look at the photo on the top left and you can see the irregular bottom of the mortise which is not going to make a nice tight joint.  A little hand work with a file as shown in the bottom photo gives a flat bottom as in the top right photo.

Next is to cut the glass recess using the stack dado, two ¼” blades with a 3/32" chipper in between.

A sacrificial fence is attached to the rip fence, the saw turned on and the blade slowly raised to cut a small inset into it as shown in the top photo below.  With the saw off the depth of cut is set using a height gauge shown in the bottom photo and the width set just a couple thousandths of an inch less than the mortise cheeks.  That’s to allow for the slight variance in board thickness to give me some cushion when the tenons are fitted to the mortise.  Test cuts are made to assure that the settings are correct adjusting as necessary.

Once set the rails and stile are cut.  The top photo shows the setup and cut top rail.  On this piece one end has a small chip left while on the other end it is completely gone.  That’s the result of the very, very minor variations in board thickness.  The bottom photo is a closeup of the barely hanging on chip.

Cutting the tenon is next.  In theory because the just cut dado is right at the thickness of the mortise cheek to cut the tenon all I need to do is use the same blade height and cross cut the long rails.  However, when I made the test cuts on my sample piece the tenon was too thick by about .03”.  That led to some head scratching trying to understand why there was a difference.  Doing some measuring and looking at the saw setup it seemed like the culprit is the table saw insert.  When I press down on the board being cut to make the tenon the insert flexes ever so slightly resulting in about 15 thousandths deeper cut than the test cut when I was not pressing down as hard.  Since the cast iron saw top does not flex in making the crosscuts the cut is not quite as deep and the tenon is too thick.  Raising the blade that 15 thousandths worked allowing me to get a good fit.  The photo on the top shows the overall table saw setup using a stand to support the end of the stile.  The photo on the bottom shows the business end of the setup.

As you can see in the photos below things don’t yet quite fit together right.  That’s because the tenon needs to be a 5/16” longer on the side with the rabbit for the glass.  This cut has to be made just right.  To short and the inside of the stile will not butt up against the top and bottom rail.  Too long and there will be a gap on the outside face of the door.  After some trial and error with my test piece the table saw is set up and ready to go. 

Next up – Door Joints Part 2 & a Patch

FLW Cabinet - #5 Bandsawing, a Revision & Work on Doors

With the bandsaw now in better shape than it ever was I was ready to re-saw the 16 side spacers.  First step is to use my marking gauge set at 9/16” or 1/16” over my final finished dimension of ½”.  Here you can just see the pencil mark on the board edge.  The knot is not a problem as it will be cut out before I am finished.

This is my standard re-sawing setup; a pivot point so I can correct the blade path when it starts to drift one way or another and my magnetic featherboard set to apply a little pressure against the piece to hold it tight to the pivot point.

Here is the cut piece right off the saw and I am really happy with the result.  Too bad it only took me 18 years to correct the original problem. 

Once all 16 pieces were re-sawn I ran them through the thickness sander to clean up what little roughness the bandsaw left then set them aside.  These pieces are all flatsawn so I think that they will cup at least a little as they adjust to their new thickness.  The flat stack on the right are the ripped cutoffs I will save for another project.

Next the ¾” thick parts for the doors were cut to rough width and set aside to rest.  While doing this it occurred to me that I had a problem with my original door corner joint.  Because the glass panel in the door is large and fairly heavy, I wanted as much strength at the corner as possible.  To get the maximum glue surface I will use a bridal joint as shown on the left.  The problem with that is to cut the center out I need to use a jig on the table saw which requires the piece to stand on end.  Not a problem with a normal cabinet door but this one is almost 78” tall which is 1” more than the distance between the top of my table saw and the ceiling.  My next version was to go to a regular mortise and tenon joint shown in the middle.  However, with that cut the available glue area is reduced by almost 50% so it’s not a good option.  Last and what I plan on doing is reversing the bridal joint so the piece I need to sand on end to cut the tenon is not the upright but the cross piece.  That piece is only about 31” well within what’s possible to cut. 

The only real difference is the how the stiles and rails intersect.  The left image shows the original plan and the right shows the revised plan.

While making those changes, I also made some minor detail changes to the case construction and now hope the design is pretty much set although from past experience I know that’s not the case as things will change.  Below is a revised cut list based on the updated plans.

Because the existing leaded glass window is the key component and has a fixed size that means the actual construction of the piece starts with fitting the door to the glass then working my way out.  It’s like building a room to fit a piece of furniture instead of finding a piece of furniture to fit in the room.   The drawing of the horizontal rails is below.  The left side show the back with the recess at the bottom for the window while the one on the right is the front side.  The small squares are where wood pegs will go.  More on that later.

This is the drawing for the back of the vertical stiles.  The recess shown on the bottom is where the sides of the window will go.  The tenon on the end gets cut and fitted after the mortise in the rail since its easier to fit the tenon to the mortise than the other way around.  More on that later too.

As the door stiles and rails have been sitting for a few days it’s time to check them out to see if they are still true or if they have moved.  As I left the rough-cut pieces their thickness was roughly 13/16” thick.  Fortunately, they are stable so the work could progress without any gymnastics to get them back into shape.  What was needed was to get rid of the planer scallops and get all the pieces to a constant thickness.  As they sit now the thickness varies a little and to make the corner bridal joints being off a little will make the difference between a great fit and a sloppy one.  The photo on the top shows the before view and you can see the board is far from being smooth.  After running it through the thickness sander loaded with 220 grit sandpaper the bottom photo is the result, nice and smooth.  Checking with a dial caliper the thickness of all the pieces varied by only .0025” or 25 ten-thousandths of an inch, about like a sheet of typing paper.  They are a little over ¾” but in this case that’s not a problem.  Getting them the same exact width is the primary goal.

Spending some time deciding which face to present to the outside and which to go inside the cabinet is next.  As the boards were rough-cut about ¼” wide flaws within that range can be cut off.  About half of the boards made for an easy decision with better looking grain on one face or a flaw that needed to be dealt with.  Here is an example of a crack that I want to get rid of.  It will go inside the cabinet and up next to the glass window.  That edge has a ¼” by 5/16” recess cut for the glass to sit in so between trimming the width and cutting the recess the crack will get removed. 

A trip through the table saw gets all the rails and stiles to their appropriate width plus 1/32”.  Just a little insurance in case I get some chip out while making cuts.  Here are the pieces ready to have a trim cut on the #1 end to square them up followed but a cut to length on the “X” end.

Next up – Door Joints Part 1