Tip O' the day from the Village Idiot

[Rick Potter]

TIP: When making a cabinet face frame with Kreg screws, be sure and double check...twice.

I am celebrating another of my WW failures tonight.

I am making a kitchenette cabinet for the adult grand daughters cottage we built last year in the back yard. She wanted to help, so I am teaching her how to do a few things. Today I was gonna assemble the face frame. Laid it out dry and everything was hunky dory, two drawer stacks, and three cabinet doors in a single base. All perfectly square and planed/sanded to all the same thickness.

Disassembled it, got out the glue, put all but the last two pieces together glued and Kregged, when I stopped for lunch. A couple hours later, out to the shop to finish it but it looked funny. Why is that stile that is marked 'wall' on the wrong end? Hmm. Hey it's not on the wrong end, the whole face frame is built backwards!

It was the old upside down and backwards curse I have lived with all my life, coming after me again. I had pre-assembled the frame on the bench face side up, then took one piece at a time and assembled them in the same order turning them over to glue and screw.

Presto: A perfect, proud to be my best work, face frame assembled BACKWARDS.

Some teacher. I suppose I could just mount it as is, and claim all those screws on the front were planned that way. If this was for the shop, I might just do that.

[Ralph Boumenot]

I feel your pain.

[Brian Tymchak]

BTDT.


...I suppose I could just mount it as is, and claim all those screws on the front were planned that way...

Hmm, you might be starting a new look in cabinetry!!

[Jim Becker]

You actually taught her a good lesson.... ;) ...and it's unlikely that there anyone among us who hasn't done this, too.

[Mike Kees]

I actually have never done that. Perhaps it may have something to do with never building face frames, pretty sure if I had that I would be able to come up with a whole new mistake...

[George Yetka]

If you use the kreg plugs you could put it up

the one I make most often with cabinets is mirroring both side panels with kreg thereby putting the pocketholes on the outside of one.

[Ronald Blue]

Mistake? Rest assured everyone of us has made plenty of mistakes. If you never make a mistake you aren't doing anything. Besides it's time spent with your granddaughter and creating memories. Something to laugh about. Whatever you decide to do it will be what the two of you decide.

[Keegan Shields]

Any chance it will get painted? Maybe you can convince your grand daughter all face frames are painted? Glad to hear I'm not the only one doing things like this!

[Donald G. Burns]

Some 40 odd years ago I was helping my B-in-L put paneling up in their kitchen (a rage back them) and we cut one panel for an electrical outlet from the back side only to remember that we measured from the front side. That panel went behind the refrigerator. :eek:

[Scott Clausen]

Okay I'll add my most recent one of many. I finally got a Veritas LAJ and decided to make the Paul Sellers shooting board. It was perfect for a left handed planer but I am right handed. I never thought about it until I was ready to take it on a test drive. I did get the righthanded version done a little faster though.

[Andrew More]

It was the old upside down and backwards curse I have lived with all my life, coming after me again. I had pre-assembled the frame on the bench face side up, then took one piece at a time and assembled them in the same order turning them over to glue and screw.


Done that quite a bit, I've also got clinically diagnosed dyslexia. People with dyslexia have a cognitive bias to not see left/right correctly for whatever reason. Check twice, glue once. :)

[Lee Schierer]

I feel you pain, after I did that a few times, I always write on the back side with chalk. So that side goes toward the fence, etc.

[Jim Braun]

Stuff happens, I was going for a rectangle not a “Z”
462425
After a good chuckle, I redid the tail board and finished up.
462426

[Chris Luke]

Perhaps an opportunity to learn how veneers work!

[Bill McNiel]

Any chance it will get painted? Maybe you can convince your grand daughter all face frames are painted? Glad to hear I'm not the only one doing things like this!

I would assume (we all know what that leads to) that the choice of poplar means it will be painted. I would use the Kreg plugs, Bondo, sand and paint.

Woodworking is not about doing everything perfectly, it is how we fix/mask our blunders.

[Bob Cooper]

I was building a mirror frame to go in a “room over the garage” where one side of the mirror had to match the pitch of the roof. Yep. Same thing happened. I could bring myself to throw it away so I have one for the other side of the wall if I ever need it.

[Rick Potter]

Thank you for the understanding and sympathy. Nice to know I am not alone.

Poplar? Never mentioned poplar, it is all selected rift sawn red oak I have been gathering for a while. I like to do face frames with reasonably straight grain, and put some cathedral pattern on the raised panels in the doors.

I have painted cabinets in a rental or two, but only after the cabinets have been trashed. I will be doing a new kitchen in a rental soon using painted poplar. What can I say, I'm not getting any younger.

Today I took the whole thing apart, saving what I could. I managed to use most of it in the original design by cutting the joints as close as possible to the ends. Surprisingly the cabinet is only about 1/4" shorter than planned, I will be attempting to use most of the original kreg holes, hopefully reattaching them without the screws being too long. I only shortened most rails 1/32 on each end where the holes are, and replaced some of the stiles that split taking them apart.

I trimmed the rails with the glue and splits by using the RAS to trim the splinters off, then putting the piece against the RAS blade with a little pressure on it, then turning the saw on and trimming just the glue off. kept them all as long as I could save, and as mentioned above I only lost about a 32nd on each end, which shouldn't bother the kreg joints.

The top and bottom rails I simply turned over, so any holes will be hidden, and one of the drawer stacks I took off intact and trimmed as a unit. It is now dry assembled on the bench again, just a bit smaller.

That's the plan for tomorrow. I hope it works, if not it gets torn down again and everything shortened up for future use, so it is not a total loss.

I will report on whether this brainstorm actually works.


PS: Dyslexic? There is some in the family, and my daughter and grand daughter run a dyslexic tutoring business out of the house here. Two grandkids have it and it had to come from somewhere. In my case it is more likely creeping old age, but never say never.

[Rich Engelhardt]

If it's any consolation - I just made a drawer & put the tongues on the sides & dadoes on the front & back. :( .
The good news is - I discovered my mistake before I did the other 5 drawers & the one I screwed up I can cut down to use somewhere else. :) .

[Alan Lightstone]

My friend's builder put in the cabinets in their master closet and drove the screws right through the pocket door. They were all shaking their heads as to why the doors wouldn't open.

[Rick Potter]

I have to admit I have made that mistake already. Twice, years apart.

My worst mistake was when I drilled a 1 1/2" hole for a power cord through the back of my $1600 roll top desk...with the top rolled up. Never gave it a thought that the top was right behind the panel I was having so much trouble drilling through.

Maybe it isn't senility, that one was a long time ago.

[Bill McNiel]

Thank you for the understanding and sympathy. Nice to know I am not alone.

Poplar? Never mentioned poplar, it is all selected rift sawn red oak I have been gathering for a while. I like to do face frames with reasonably straight grain, and put some cathedral pattern on the raised panels in the doors.

My apologies, I guess trying to respond after 5 hrs of oral surgery and consuming "appropriate" pain killers is not a good idea.

[Rick Potter]

Ouch,

With all that surgery, I am surprised you are not seeing pink Unicorn ballerinas.

Get well soon.

[Roger Feeley]

I make the same sort of mistakes. I do the hard stuff right and the easy stuff wrong. My best story is back when I was first learning computer programming. In a test for a FORTRAN class, we had to write a bubble sort in longhand. The teacher told me later that mine was the only code that would have run bug-free…but I sorted the list backwards. I told the story to a friend and he called me a highly intelligent screw-up.