Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Preliminary fitting...

When I last left off, I had trimmed and prepared the panels for the cabinets. With this task complete, the next step is to test fit the side panels to the tops and bottoms. I use a few loose dowels to assemble the panels together, just enough to keep everything rigid and square. I need to perform this step to both fit the back panel correctly and to fit the front doors.

The front doors need to be fit accurately as the knife hinges I am using do not allow much of a tolerance in the gap between the top, bottom and door. I am liberal with the use of blue tape to hold the doors together. This also gives me the opportunity to confirm that the grain orientation and the graphics of the doors are in harmony with the rest of the cabinet. The veneered top and bottom panels provided me the opportunity to make them thicker and in my opinion this adds to the aesthetic of the cabinet in a positive way. I feel good about this design and the proportions...the ratio of height to width I have chosen. I did work with limitations however... namely the available widths of the veneers I had resawn. I can now proceed with marking the knife hinge mortises and then begin the hinge installation process.

I've been away from this cabinet build for a while and hope to catch up quickly now. I've been working on a new endeavor http://www.woodskills.com/ and this has been somewhat time consuming but very enjoyable to me.