Jerome Hanby
12-27-2011, 10:20 PM
Is there a good "trick" or technique to help the end result of building the carcass to turn out square. I'm currently building some shop cabinets using Tom Clark's book as a guide. When I can stop myself from making stupid mistakes, I'm making pretty good progress. Tom talks about gluing and stapling the back on as really squaring up the cabinet. In my case, I measured diagonals, then used a couple of K-body clamps hooked together to apply pressure along the "longer" diagonal to try and pull things square. I got it pretty close, but it's not perfect. Since this is the first of a bunch of cabinets, I'd love to get better with each one. Any recommendations?
Just in case anyone is curious, This cabinet is about 72" high, about 24" wide, and 23 1/2 " deep (not counting the back or "face frame"). It has 4 shelves, each a tray made from 1/2" plywood running on pair of 22" full extension 100 lb drawer slides, and two doors, one about 6" taller than the other. The two doors part was a change at the very last when I got nervous about a door that tall staying flat <g>. I picked the height trying to take advantage of the super tall ceilings in the shop. Hanging this cabinet on the wall far enough off the floor to clear my electrical conduit and leave enough room to slide Rubbermaid storage bins underneath made a six foot cabinet about the tallest I could handle without needing a ladder to reach the top shelf. My original thought was to go four feet wide, but I realised that this thing would way a ton and be very difficult to move around the shop and mount. It's pretty heavy at two feet wide!
I don't think I'm going to do any more sliding shelves. They work well but for all the trouble and material, I could have just made actual drawers.
Any help and advise will be much appreciated!
Just in case anyone is curious, This cabinet is about 72" high, about 24" wide, and 23 1/2 " deep (not counting the back or "face frame"). It has 4 shelves, each a tray made from 1/2" plywood running on pair of 22" full extension 100 lb drawer slides, and two doors, one about 6" taller than the other. The two doors part was a change at the very last when I got nervous about a door that tall staying flat <g>. I picked the height trying to take advantage of the super tall ceilings in the shop. Hanging this cabinet on the wall far enough off the floor to clear my electrical conduit and leave enough room to slide Rubbermaid storage bins underneath made a six foot cabinet about the tallest I could handle without needing a ladder to reach the top shelf. My original thought was to go four feet wide, but I realised that this thing would way a ton and be very difficult to move around the shop and mount. It's pretty heavy at two feet wide!
I don't think I'm going to do any more sliding shelves. They work well but for all the trouble and material, I could have just made actual drawers.
Any help and advise will be much appreciated!