Cabinets makers please help.

[Glen Butler]

I am now committed to making 100 cabinet doors for my father by the end of the week. He is way over budget and I owe him some money. I am really stressed now because I told him to give me ten doors and I will see if I am capable of turning a product. I am almost finished with the 10 when he ordered the materials for all the doors and I am stuck with it.

The tools I have are:

8" jointer
20" planer
Table saw
Shaper

I know most production shops have the fancy sanding equipment and laser guided straight line rip saws. I don't. So how to I make great cabinet doors without the best tools. This is what I have been doing.

1) Rough cut 4/4 material to length for panels, rails, and stiles.
2) Surface plane one side smooth on the jointer.
3) Rip to proper width
4) Glue up panels
5) Plane everything to proper width
6) Shape
7) Assemble
8) Hand sand blems.

It is only the first 5 steps that seems there is a better way to do it. I am thinking I should:

1) Cut rough stock to managable sizes by cutting out undesirable material.
2) Surface plane.
3) Glue up panels.
4) Thickness plane
5) Cut to with then length

My problem is occuring by the fact I don't have a massive drum sander. My planer causes tear out more than the jointer so I am also thinking of leaving enough thickness on each board to run across the jointer then gluing the panels but that would require buiscuiting them so they stay flat together.

[Joe Jensen]

I live in Phoenix and there are several shops that will sand jobs for customers on their wide belt sanders. They charge like $100 an hour. I did 56 door panels and was able to have them sanded in less than an hour. But they were already very level glue ups.

I think it would be worth the time and cost to find someone in your area who is willing to do it.

[Dave Lehnert]

I use to fight with getting my projects flat. I would make a disaster using a belt sander. Discovered the hand plane and never looked back.
a few swipes of the hand plane and thought "You got to be kidding me how easy this is" Just a good old flea market plane for $20. Nothing fancy.

[J.R. Rutter]

I don't envy you. I started my cabinet door business under similar circumstances 8 years ago with similar equipment. 100 doors per week for a couple of months...

Since this is a one-time shot, I would plan to spend some money to sand panel stock flat and possibly to sand the assembled doors through a wide belt sander. Unless you are in the middle of nowhere, there is a cabinet shop that would be happy to run these through their sander within a 30 minute drive.

Here is the down and dirty way to get through this.

Rough crosscut for panels using the flattest grain boards (not quartersawn). Rip the edges close to straight. Lay out your panel blanks about 1" over length. Combine panel widths to the capacity of your clamps. Flip the boards up on edge in the oder that you are going to glue them up. Run several staves at a time over the jointer on each edge, flipping the stack sideways to do the other edge so that any misalignment in the fence cancels. After glue-up, rough plane the panels to whatever thickness will let you sand out tear out on the wide belt.

For rail and stile parts, use the flattest boards and take the time to: rough rip, crosscut over length, joint, plane, and finish crosscut, in that order.

Now you can shape and hand sand any profiles in the panel with a ROS. Call in favors or hire some kids for this if need be. Shape the frame parts and glue up. Get some extra clamps so that you can rotate doors through the system with about 10-15 minutes clamp time per door. You can see that total assembly time will be a marathon. Take the assembled doors back to the cabinet shop to run through the sander. ROS to get rid of cross grain scratches and away you go.

I hope you are not on the hook to finish these!

[Glen Butler]

I do have cabinet shops in my area and I know they would be willing to do this. How much does the wide sander take off or how aggressive can they be? I have noticed the planer takes out tiny chips and need to sand them away. Probably up to 1/32 deep. Can this happend on the wide sander. Basically, what thickness should I plane to to end up with 3/4 after the sander.

[Jay Brewer]

I do have cabinet shops in my area and I know they would be willing to do this. How much does the wide sander take off or how aggressive can they be? I have noticed the planer takes out tiny chips and need to sand them away. Probably up to 1/32 deep. Can this happend on the wide sander. Basically, what thickness should I plane to to end up with 3/4 after the sander.


I build all my doors from 13/16" stock. After glue up and wide belt sanding I end up with a door that is .780. I do 2 passes each side on the widebelt.

This all really depends on how flat you can glue your panels and how precise your rail and stile cuts line up.

Like others have said, save yourself alot of headaches and find a shop that has a widebelt.

[Peter Quinn]

I do have cabinet shops in my area and I know they would be willing to do this. How much does the wide sander take off or how aggressive can they be? I have noticed the planer takes out tiny chips and need to sand them away. Probably up to 1/32 deep. Can this happend on the wide sander. Basically, what thickness should I plane to to end up with 3/4 after the sander.

The shop I work at sells shop time to lots of local craftsman and small shops, mostly wide belt time but occasionally time on the 24" spiral head planer or 20" jointer as well. Those might be options in your area as well. As to the tear out try to minimize that with sharp knives, light passes, optimum grain orientation and possibly skewing the boards as they pass through the planer, ie don't push them straight through, let them ride through sideways as much as possible. Our planer can handle most cabinet door panels and the spiral head rarely tears out grain, so check to see if your local shop has that available. Less wide belt time.

As to how much material a wide belt will remove, depends on species, the grit of belt used and the individual sander. Unlike a planer which shaves wood to the exact thickness defined by the height of the planer head, a sander involves more variables. A wide belt will not 'Tear out" stock but it will scratch across the grain of rails on assembled doors and it may snipe if pushed too hard. You can expect 80G to take off .025" per pass, 100G between .010"-.020" per pass, 120G maybe .010-015" per pass and so on. These are rough guidelines. The sander might take more if pushed but surface quality may be compromised.

For machine sanding assembled doors I like to stick to finer grits and lighter passes, maybe .012" per pass maximum to minimize cross grain scratches and snipe that can occur. When a wide belt goes from sanding just the two stiles to sanding the width of the door as it hits the rail you can get a bit of snipe if you are sanding too heavy, and this can be tough to get rid of by hand later. I like to leave panels 1/32" over final dimension, and that assumes fairly flat and flush glue ups. I leave door frame material similarly over sized for machine sanding.

[Lee Bidwell]

I'm a home hobbyist who just finished about 30 doors for my kitchen remodel. Regarding getting the glue up as flat as possible, I stumbled across these 4-way equal pressure clamps:

http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=10711&cookietest=1

They take a little longer to set up than your regular K-body clamps, but they insure a flat finished product. I haven't seen them discussed on this forum before and don't know others' opinion of them, but, IMO, they are God's gift to flat panel glue ups.

Lee

[fRED mCnEILL]

"They take a little longer to set up than your regular K-body clamps, but they insure a flat finished product. I haven't seen them discussed on this forum before and don't know others' opinion of them, but, IMO, they are God's gift to flat panel glue ups."
When I first started woodworking I made a set of these clamps. They work fine but are a bear to set up. But now I only use the Bessey parallel jaws clamps. As long as the boards are cut properly glue up is a snap. But properly jointecd boards are critical.

Fred Mc.

[Mike Cruz]

Glen, a few things:

I do not envy you for your task;
I DO envy you for your tools ;);
I worked in a professional shop for almost 5 years. We didn't have the sander either until about 6 months before I left. We did cabinets without them. Of course, not 100 a week. But then again, that is why we were called a custom shop.

Hang in there. Do what you can. If I can reiterate what I put in the "favorite sayings" post:

Don't worry about those things you can't control, you have no control over them;
Don't worry about the things you can control, you have control over them.

[Chip Lindley]

Glen, were you *under the influence* when you elected to undertake a Large project that you are not very equiped to do? A One Week time frame gives you no learning curve at all. But you Will learn something this week--not to make that mistake again!

Seriously--Best Of Luck this week!

[Jim Foster]

Not a pro, but my limited experience with panels and biscuits is that biscuits do not guarantee flatness. They do help to register the edges together to make it easier to clamp without things slipping around (at least for a beginner), but they do not help a lot with respect to flatness.

Finding a shop that can help with drum sanding or wide belt sanding should mitigate some of the extra work in fixing tearout and hand sanding.


I am now committed to making 100 cabinet doors for my father by the end of the week. He is way over budget and I owe him some money. I am really stressed now because I told him to give me ten doors and I will see if I am capable of turning a product. I am almost finished with the 10 when he ordered the materials for all the doors and I am stuck with it.

The tools I have are:

8" jointer
20" planer
Table saw
Shaper

I know most production shops have the fancy sanding equipment and laser guided straight line rip saws. I don't. So how to I make great cabinet doors without the best tools. This is what I have been doing.

1) Rough cut 4/4 material to length for panels, rails, and stiles.
2) Surface plane one side smooth on the jointer.
3) Rip to proper width
4) Glue up panels
5) Plane everything to proper width
6) Shape
7) Assemble
8) Hand sand blems.

It is only the first 5 steps that seems there is a better way to do it. I am thinking I should:

1) Cut rough stock to managable sizes by cutting out undesirable material.
2) Surface plane.
3) Glue up panels.
4) Thickness plane
5) Cut to with then length

My problem is occuring by the fact I don't have a massive drum sander. My planer causes tear out more than the jointer so I am also thinking of leaving enough thickness on each board to run across the jointer then gluing the panels but that would require buiscuiting them so they stay flat together.

[Glen Butler]

Dodged the bullet. Dad says I have more time to do the doors because they are costmetic to the house so they will just escrow that amount. Building doors is easy and setting up the tooling is easy. I just have problems with the planer chiping out stuff. Maybe Jets' helical head is lower quality than Powermatics'. I will just glue up all my panels then take them to get surface planed before I shape them. I can get my raised panel to line up perfectly so no need to run the whole door and have to deal with cross grain scrathes IMO. Thank for all the help guys.

[Glen Butler]

It has been a while, but I wanted to thank everyone who offered advice. The doors turned out excellent.

[Peter Quinn]

Glad to hear it. Dod you meet your time frame? Would you do it again?

[Glen Butler]

The bank escrowed the money for the doors so I did have time to complete the project, and looking back is not as bad as looking ahead. It is not as difficult as it seemed it would be but it was more time consuming. I will do it again. In fact, I am in the drafting stage of my next project, which is even bigger than the first.