D_W":1pnxk0iv said:
For the last couple of years, I've been fighting no desire to finish my kitchen cabinets for various reasons - mostly because my spouse is non-supportive to say the least - conflict of time with kids, etc. I have to admit that now that I'm almost done, I have just as little desire to strip the kitchen walls and floor and put new of both in (though I'd LOVE to do it if I was retired and didn't have other time conflicts).
I've made 9 cabinets so far, typical face frame design. Plywood back and sides and the drawers are just poplar boxes with cherry fronts attached. The doors will be raised panel (and the cabinets are capped with those on the visible ends, too). Haven't decided on countertops, but would like to do wood. The mrs. says no way. Cost is the root of our argument about what the countertops will be. I value funding kids' college and retirement above stylish kitchen).
https://s24.postimg.org/aely2nkth/P1100022.jpg
While I don't have much interest in building these, and haven't since the first one, I will admit that it is kind of nice to do some of the stuff like bang-it-out dovetails in the poplar drawers. Gluing up dadoed cabinets without a claim like you'd have in a cabinet factory is a bit of a pain, though.
The drawers aren't glued in this picture, and the black lines on the pins are just pencil marks.
David, stop dragging your feet! What your wife is probably moaning about is the amount of time you play with planes and sharpening, and make videos instead of building the cabinets!
Change your mindset .. see the plywood face frames as an opportunity to test the durability of different blade life. See the Poplar dovetails as a challenge to chop the baselines in one stroke, and paring endgrain as a test of chisel sharpness as measured by the various stones you collect! :lol:
I am in the process of giving our kitchen a facelift. We built the house 20 years ago and everything is a little tired now. In contrast to yours, we are going from raised panels to simple Shaker. The wood is going from Tasmanian Oak to USA Hard Maple. I plan to finish in a water-based poly to retain the light colour - trying to avoid any yellowing.
Here are examples ...
So far I have completed 12 of 22 doors, and am in the process of assembling the rest ..
The reason I have not posted this here is that the joinery is Festool Domino. I bought the smaller 500 just for this job. I really do not wish to spend my life making mortice and tenons for doors that have a lifespan of about 20 years (owing to fashion rather than quality). Dimensioning with power is the order of the day.
Still, I can use the bench for work holding ...
... and I do use handtools throughout where possible ..
I do note a mitre saw in your shop. How are you dimensioning your wood?
Regards from Perth
Derek
Derek, I do have a small portable table saw and a thickness planer. I have hand dimensioned (thicknessed and sawed) about half of the wood and power dimensioned the other half, just depending on what I felt like doing. All of it had to be hand jointed. There's definitely less surprise with hand dimensioning (not from the planer, but from the cheapie table saw), certainly some of the drawer sides aren't identical thickness (though each is uniform thickness, they just aren't all exactly the same), which slowed down the dovetailing a little bit as it prevented cutting tails in pairs.
As the kids get older, I have less time in the shop, but I have thoroughly enjoyed doing quite a lot of the dimensioning by hand, and the plywood that I got is a softwood ply and very easy to plane if cut a hair large - easy to hand saw, too - but requires some reinforcement where it will be screwed into the wall. (I forgot about the track saw and the festool router, those have been helpful).
Only M&T'd the face frames, as the doors are done on a freud router bit set - cope and stick, I suppose. I wish I'd have gone with flat panel, some of my doors are large and I think as time goes on with woodworking, I've come to appreciate things that are lighter. My current cabinet doors are thick, but the back half of them is hollow. I'm sure it was a material savings for the maker to do them that way, but it's miles easier on the cabinets, too.
I don't begrudge power tool use on this stuff at all, it's utility (kitchen cabinets, that is). I chose to do a bunch of grunt work by hand because it tickles my gaba receptors like a good run or bike ride and I see the appreciation that my grandfather had for breaking a sweat (in his words, the only way to clear your head is to break a sweat). There are a million ways to get this done faster than i did. My wife requested drawers with guides, which I don't really like - they could've been pinned together and would've worked fine, but I do like to dovetail drawers and cases as sort of a nice repetition job where there is no real possible penalty (the drawer overlay will keep the dovetails in the front hidden when the drawers are closed, and the back ones will never be seen).
(You should've seen some of the stuff we built at a cabinet factory where I worked while I was in college - hot glued drawers made with dust that had a tape covering all over it that really didn't even look like wood, and they were "mid-range cabinets" at the time. That was in the late 1990s, and by far the most popular cabinet material was honey oak flat panel, next was thermofoil MDF white cabinets - we had flat panel maple at the time, but it hadn't quite come in yet and light and dark raised and flat panel maples were only about 15% of the orders - I thought they looked better back then, though and I was no woodworker at the time).
As a separate mention, my wife mentioned that she wants my utilitarian chest of drawers to be replaced, so my favorite piece of furniture that I didn't even make is now on the outs in return for something larger. I favor making something like you showed in that thread, and I'm glad you showed it. The most agonizing part for me of most builds (aside from the kitchen cabinets here) is settling on something relatively modest looking that is tasteful and that doesn't look like - for lack of a better way to put it - the first project for every power tool worker with no curves or ugly curves and lots of bulk.
