Face frame and hinge advice needed

[David Bolson]

I haven't built a cabinet in quite a long time and I've forgotten lots. I've been almost exclusively playing with my lathe. I decided to build a cabinet to go under a wall mounted TV. I have some nicely figured maple that is 1/4" thick and were guitar seconds (I purchased them on this forum). I cut them to the largest size I could get from them, laminated them to 3/4" maple playwood, and glued on a walnut frame.

cab3.jpg

Since I was going to be liimited by the size of those boards, I decided to start with the doors. I realize that this may have been backwards, but it's already done. The doors are about 16 1/4" x 7 1/4". Eight doors (4 pairs).

My first, very basic sketch, was this:

cab2.jpg

My preference now is to have the doors all as close together as possible, like this:

cab1.jpg

I'm thinking that I build a carcass with virtually no face frame - just strips of walnut to cover the plywood edges. And find hinges that will allow me to fit those doors in tight. Am I on the right track? Am I asking for trouble going for such tight tolerances? Any suggestions on which hinge to use (those hinge catalogs are damn confusing)? Any suggestions of videos to watch or articles to read to give me some guidance?

Thanks for any help.

David

[Jamie Buxton]

Your doors are 3/4" plywood with 1/4" of solid lumber on only one face? That'd worry me. The solid lumber may expand or contract with seasonal changes in humidity level in your house, and that may cause cupping or warping of the doors. The doors would be more stable if they had balanced construction. That is, they should have the same thickness of lumber glued to the other face. (Ideally, the lumber layers would be thinner too, like 1/8". Then there would be less force being applied to the plywood . If you have a 12" planer, you could get there from where you are.)

There are two main kinds of hinges you could use: knuckle hinges, and cup hinges. Knuckle hinges are like the hinges on a house's front door. You can buy ones which are cabinet size. They look good, and they open 180 degrees. The downside is that if you need to tweak a door position, it is difficult. Cup hinges are likely what you have on your kitchen cabinets. They are readily adjustable, which is good. The usual cup hinges are intended for 3/4-thick doors, and they won't work on 1" doors. Look for "thick door" versions. Unfortunately, all the thick door euro hinges open only 95 degrees.

[David Bolson]

Thanks, Jamie. I do have a planer, and I used it to get the doors to uniform thickness. But it really did a number on a couple of the doors because of the figure. There are still a couple of chips/gouges that I couldn’t sand down to. I really don’t want to put them through the planer again. I don’t have a drum sander which would take me forever to sand them all down anyway. I think I’m just going to have to take the chance that they won’t warp or won’t warp much. This piece will be in my basement, so if it gets bad, I’ll just make new doors.

I didn’t know about the need for thick door hinges. Since the doors are so close together, I think 95 degrees is probably fine. I prefer to use the euro hinges because I don’t trust my ability to get the fit exactly right with the knuckle hinges.