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Thread: Cabinet door from thick stock

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Mar 2018
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    Cabinet door from thick stock

    I am making a 50" wide x 48" tall cabinet door, using 1.25" thick stock. The rails and stiles will be 3.5" wide and it will support a 3/8" glass panel.

    What is the best technique to make the door - tenon and mortise, then the decorative edge from a raised panel door set?

    I don't have a shaper.

    Thanks for your help!
    Rob

  2. #2
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    Mar 2003
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    That's a big door, and very thick glass. If my math is right, the glass alone will weigh 63 pounds. So plan on using hinges like you'd use to hang a house front door.

    And think about this... With the door closed, the 80 pounds of the door is going to be levering on the casework on the hinge side. I'd expect it would twist the casework. Can you split the door in the middle, so you have two doors? They'd present a balanced load to the casework.

  3. #3
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    Hi Jamie. Thanks for your thoughts and concerns. You are absolutely correct. I am using 5 SOSS hinges, but more than that when the door is closed - which is the majority of the time, there will be bolts going through the door and into threaded bar. Those bolts will hold the weight, taking it off of the hinges.

    A bit more details. This is a display case to house several high end guns for a friend of mine. The case is actually a steel box, wrapped in wood. The bolts going through the door frame are safety screws with unique heads to prevent access. Those bolts will be hidden under removable decorative molding. There are additional security in an around the box, all with the intentions of layering security. The typical thief won't get in, the sophisticated thief will have a hard time getting into it before police arrive.

    He doesn't want split doors for 2 reasons - primarily viability and it creates an additional security challenge.

    The glass company told me the glass panel should be about 35#. I am anticipating about 20 - 25 pounds for the wood.

    So still trying to determine the best way to make the door frame.

  4. #4
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    I'd make the door frame with mortise and tenon at the corners. The tenons should be at least 1 1/2" long, and 2" would be better.

    How are you going to hold the glass into the frame? In cabinet doors, that's often done with wooden stop molding which is fastened in place with brads. Maybe in that construction, your burglar could just kick the glass in. Brads aren't very strong.

    Come to think of it.... Your burglar first kicks the glass panel without success, so he walks 20 feet to the kitchen, finds a nice big cast iron frying pan or the like, comes back, and smashes the glass. He's taken 30 seconds, and he's inside the gun safe.

  5. #5
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    Mortise and tenons could work. I haven't done a lot of that... but can practice with scrap and make it work.

    I really appreciate your other thoughts and certainly it is not completely fool proof. I am using polycarbonate glass in 3/8" so impact will be very difficult. The door will be routed so that the glass insets just deep enough into the door and will be held to the door with screws. Then as stated before, security bolts will go through the door, through the polycarbonate glass, through the steel rim of the case, into threaded steel material. Thus, the entire wood structure can be destroyed and still not get in.

    The polycarbonate glass has a very high impact resistance, so frying pan or baseball bat won't do it..... but yes there are vulnerabilities in that material. Thus within the case, there are additional security measures (I have suggested a small deadly snake, but we aren't using that plan - lol). The cabinet is also being secured in a way that it would be difficult or impossible to even tear the wall apart and take the case, let alone the total weight and size of this thing would be very difficult to move.

    OK, help me just slightly with the mortise and tenons. with the door frame being 1.25" thick and 3 to 3.5" wide, how big should the tenon be. 2" long x .5" thick x 1.5" wide? Do I add anything to it by putting a dowel pin through the frame and tenon?

    Thanks much!

  6. #6
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    Ah, polycarbonate. That's not glass, it is plastic. It is much better against a frying pan than real glass. You can also cut it with woodworking tools, which is very useful. And that explains my bad estimate of the weight of the window.

    That size of tenon will do. In olden days, when glues were not as good as today, cross-pinning the M&T helped keep it together. Nowadays, if the joint fits well, the cross-pin is mostly decoration. (If the joint fit is sloppy, perhaps the cross-pin does buy you some strength.)

  7. #7
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    Mar 2005
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    Cashiers NC
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    Maybe you could put a 1/4 steel frame behind the wood frame with them bolted together. That way the steel supports the weight and makes the wood frame harder to penetrate. You could reduce the thickness of the wood to 1”.
    Charlie Jones

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