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Thread: T&G cabinet door frames: tongue and panel dimensions

  1. #16
    they are tongues not tennons, no mortise, its a slot or groove. Ive had this discussion with a young guy who owns a door company. He called his cope and stick doors mortise and tennon. Explained his cope and stick are Tongue and groove with a coped rail end. Got the deer in the headlight look. Joe here does cope and stick that is mortise and tennon with the larger cutters he uses.

    For the tongue Mark think you mentioned 3/4" and while that is bigger than any of those cutter sets or door companies ive seen ive also seen one guy doing that who complained they were hard to assemble. Its because with that much material removal his rails and styles where the deeper tongue was run were bending in and under his .250 dimension making assembly more difficult. I dont think it helps gluing either as its going to push more away when the tongue is inserted being too tight.

  2. #17
    Join Date
    Dec 2017
    Location
    Willard,Utah
    Posts
    163
    I like using spaceballs between my panels and my rails, it helps with the expansion and contraction of panels, and the joints between stile and rails are usually snug with no gaps..just my method for what it's worth

  3. #18
    here's my formula -- if i am doing inset doors, i size the rails and stiles (for glueup) such that the glued-up panel "fills" the face frame opening, giving me a little room on all sides to trim and fit the door into the opening (i aim for ~2mm inset gap). this implies that the rail and stile stock is also oversized in width to accommodate the amount i'll trim off (approximately), so it lands where i want it to be after trimming. if it's overlay, i add 1/8" or so all the way around. on the last inset kitchen, i wanted to land at rail/stile width of 2.5", so i had the shaper create sticking stock of 2 5/8", left the stiles long by 1/4" or so, and then after trimming everything lands around 2.5" wide, and the nasty edges are cleaned up and squared.

    if i'm doing veneered or painted panels that are "stable" (MDF or baltic), i glue them in, and trim them to "just a hair shy" of the opening, just enough for a little glue so it doesn't squeeze everything out and create a huge mess. if i'm veneering (most often), i rough the panel stock oversized by 2" or so for the veneer press, and trim them to size right before glueup. if the panels are floating, i subtract 3/16" for spacers/balls.

    we have a variety of cope and stick cutters - the zuani has an 11mm deep tongue, 6mm wide, the freeborns have 1/4" x 3/8". if i'm veneering panels, i take the MDF down to approximately .060 shy of the opening - that give me about .008 slop after i veneer both sides. so, for 1/4" grooves, i take the raw MDF down to ~0.690", and build it back up with veneer to ~0.74". i never have to fight the panels in the grooves, but nothing is rattling around. seems to work well.

    very rarely i'll reinforce a cope/stick joint with a domino... but that's rare, and typically unnecessary. the cope/stick joints are tight and have a tremendous amount of glue surface (when "unfolded").

    this "formula" lives in a big spreadsheet that i use to give me organized cut lists - i make different sorted versions for stock pulling and prep, then finished length/width cutting prior to glue up. i export the door panel numbers to an optimizer to rough cut those parts out of sheet stock.

    this seems to work for me... good luck with your projects!

    -- dz

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