Glass Panel Doors

[Roger Troost]

I am doing a contemporary kitchen and dining room with flat paneled doors using Brookline paper-backed composite veneers. It's beautiful stuff and can't be beat for consistent grain and color.

A few of the upper cabinets will have glass panels, and since the composite veneers don't have a complementary lumber available that I can make these doors out of I need to create my own "lumber" for the rails and stiles.

This will involve applying the veneers to a substrate, edgebanding, then treating it as if it was dimensioned lumber.

I prefer to have mitred corners, otherwise I would just use mdf panels, cut out the middle, do my edgebanding and rabbet for the glass.

I'm not sure what to use for the substrate. Plywood? MDF? Hardwood?

Does anybody have experience with this?

Thanks, Roger

[Jamie Buxton]

If you make your own "lumber" and attempt to miter it together, you'll have to get the mitered pieces to join together nearly perfectly. If one is a little proud of its neighbor, you're in danger of sanding through the veneer. To solve that problem, I'd use a single-piece substrate for the whole door. I'd miter the four veneer pieces, tape them together at the miters, and bond them on to the substrate.

My experience is that veneer always squooges around on the substrate in the veneer press. So I'd make the substrate and veneer oversize, press them together, and then trim to wherever the veneer wound up.

[Jeff Duncan]

I'll second what Jamie said...you want flat doors, that's the way to go.
good luck,
Jeffd