It has been quite a while since my last post about the built-in cabinets I have been working on...for over a year... After my last post, I still was not sure how I wanted to design and build the doors that cover the 3 upper shelves and 2 vertical cabinets. My criteria was to make the doors out of some nice hardwood and plywood that will match the existing cabinets. So far, I have used mostly cabinet-grade 3/4" birch plywood for the cabinets with the exterior painted white and the interior coated with poly over the birch veneer. The cabinets are trimmed out with poplar painted white and the interior shelves are also birch plywood. The center shelf has a solid walnut trim piece to cover the front edge of the plywood shelf and because it is inset from the front of the cabinet. The trim piece is very noticeable in the middle of the cabinet so I wanted it to stand out by using a contrasting wood and shape.
I discussed making the trim pieces in an earlier post where I explained that I made the cabinets 30" deep even though the drawers are made for 24" deep cabinet. The shelf directly above the drawers also needed to be set back which results in a 6" gap between the front of the drawers and the front of the cabinet.
When thinking about matching materials for the doors with the cabinets, I also needed to come up with a good design for fabricating them. Traditional cabinet doors are made out of wood or some wood product like plywood, particle board or MDF with various veneers. Important criteria for a good door is that it needs to be flat and it needs to hold screws for attaching hardware. It would be easy to just cut some plywood to the size of each door but they would have ugly edges plywood edges. But, more importantly, manufactured wood products don't hold screws very well, especially over time. The screw holes in wood products like MDF, particle board or plywood will always tear out and not hold your hardware properly over time. This is why manufacturers that mass produce furniture will use anchors or inserts in the particle board so the connections don't wear out over time.
We have all purchased some mass-market furniture made from particle board that comes knocked-down and requires consumer to assemble with many anchors and bolts
A traditional type of cabinet door design, before the invention of plywood, is the raised-panel door. Sine these doors were made exclusively with hardwood, cabinet makers had to deal with the materials warping or cupping over time but also expanding and contracting based on humidity in the environment. The raised-panel door addressed those concerns by using stiles and rails that formed a frame around the perimeter of the door. Stiles and rails are made of wood pieces that run the length of the grain as opposed to the width to avoid and warping or cupping. The interior panel is made up of a few wider boards that are glued together with pieces oriented with alternating grain directions so that panel should stay flat. The panel will absorb moisture during the summer months which will cause it to expand in width. During the winter months, the panel will loose moisture, and shrink in width. For this reason the panel is not glued into the frame and instead floats in grooves cut into the outer stiles and rails.
I wanted this design to be simpler and easier to construct than raised-panel doors but also be attractive and remain flat over time. I decided to make each door out of the same 3/4" birch plywood for the panel and make the stiles and rails out of solid walnut. The interior plywood panel should stay flat, due to the nature of plywood, and the solid walnut outer frame would be available to attach any needed hardware. The Birch and Walnut also provide nice contrast on top of the white outer cabinet and trim. I would glue the inner edges of the stiles and rails directly to the plywood edges and use more biscuits to make the glue joint stronger. I am a little worried about the stiles and rails expanding and contracting over time while being glued to the panels but I am hoping the plywood will flex a little to compensate. Worst case, some of the seams could split over time but with the biscuits I am hoping keep the seams stay together. Only time will tell.
Now that I had a basic idea for the design of the doors, I turned to xDesign to model the doors in-context with the cabinets already built. In the time-lapse video below, I model both the 4 vertical doors and the 3 upper horizontal doors.
I start by opening the assembly and inserting a blank part. Then, I mate the ref planes from the new part to components in the assembly. I then, activate the new component to allow me create geometry for the door in-context with the overall cabinet design and room. I created a sketch and drew a rectangle right on top of the cabinet trim where the door sits so that I can see how to dimension everything. I extruded the first stile and then drew a sketch for the panel and other stile while referencing the prior features in my sketch constraints. Each door is made from one component where I extruded each stile, rail and panel as a New Body. This is a simple way to create a multi-body component instead of having to create each individual rail, stile and panel as a separate components and then assemble them into a sub-assembly. The multi-body method is more efficient and faster for my needs. I can easily select the faces and assign colors to see how my design looks.
Once I modelled one door, I duplicated the component and mated it to the other half of the cabinet. It is pretty easy to duplicate a part in an xDesign assembly. Simply hold CTRL on your keyboard and then drag an drop a copy of the component you want from the tree in to the graphics area. It is a slick workflow.
After building the four vertical doors, I wanted to move onto the upper 3 horizontal doors next. Instead of inserting a new blank component, I really wanted to just duplicate the vertical door again and adapt it for the new door, but you can only duplicate additional instances that remain linked. Because this door will be edited to be different length, it needs to be an independent copy, but this is a more difficult workflow. I need to close my assembly and open the door on its own, make some changes and then do a Save As using a different name. Then I have to go back to my assembly, insert it and create mates. It would be nice and much faster to have a Copy as New command that I can invoke from the assembly context and not have to open or close any models...
Next, I created a drawing for the upper horizontal door as I will make these 3 first.
I used cutlist optimizer again to calculate the amount of plywood I would need. I went to the lumber yard to buy one more piece of 3/4" birch plywood and few boards of 3/4" black walnut.
I started by cutting up the sheet of plywood in to manageable pieces outside while outside on my deck. I used my circular saw and edge clamp to rough out the plywood pieces, then I did all of the finish cuts inside on my table saw.
I ripped the walnut boards into 3" strips to use for the stiles and rails. Before I gluing anything, I applied some stain on the walnut pieces to give them more color and to enhance the grain more. I find it easier to stain the walnut pieces before gluing the door pieces together. I try to do this for projects that use multiple types of woods or stains so that it will prevent any stain from bleeding into the lighter color wood pieces after its glued, which would ruin the look. This back walnut it is beautiful.
After staining, I cut slots into the 2 long stiles using the biscuit cutter and glued them to the panel. Then, I cut slots into the end rails and ends of the panel.
I always mask off the wood pieces before doing any gluing and clamping to preserve the finish of the pieces. I glued on the end rails to the complete the door and trimmed off the overhangs with a circular saw. Now that I have my first door 90% complete, I needed to figure out how these were going to attach to the cabinets and hinge properly. I will not finalizing the size of this door until I know how the hinges will work...
I had thought a lot about how these doors could hinge but I had not decided on a solution yet. The criteria for hanging the doors included that they must hang and hinge from the top edge, near the ceiling. The doors need to remain open and not slam closed, it instead should have a soft close action. The hinges needed to be robust and really accurate so, I was fearing a nightmare trying to install the doors and get them level. How will they stay open and not hit the ceiling or how to prevent from them slamming closed? Many questions still un-answered...
So, I did what any good maker would do and I turned to Google... I did some searching online for different cabinet hinges and randomly came across these incredible hinges from Ikea. These are more than just basic hinges...they are more like hinge systems... Each set comes with 2 rectangular metal hinge assemblies that are side-mounted interior to the cabinets. These seemed to be designed for this exact needs! I feel so lucky to have found these hinges as they made the install so much easier than I was expecting.
Each set that includes two hinge assemblies, two brackets, templates and screws, cost roughly \$50. I do think these are kind of expensive, plus I need to buy 3 sets totaling \$150, but the amount of features and ease of install made up for the price. By the way, I worked in product development for a manufacturer for many years and have a basic understanding of cost of goods. Not knowing the exact costs, I have to imagine that Ikea is not making much profit on these hinges as the COGs is probably close to \$50 anyway... I guess what I am saying is, even though these are expensive, I think they are worth the cost..
Each hinge assembly unit will be screwed to the inside right and left side-wall of each cabinet. There is a small metal bracket that is attached to each end of the inside face of the door. A multi-hinge arm extends from each unit and attaches to the bracket on each end of the door. The arm is spring loaded and it springs open and closed. You can adjust the maximum open angle using a set screw. This is one of the more important features for my doors since I did not want them to open too far and hit the ceiling. When closing, you just have to pull down on the door with a little force and it will fall on its own and then break to a soft close. The spring force is also adjustable with another set screw.
The Ikea hinges are obviously not designed to work with my cabinets out-of-box as they are intended for use with Ikea products. Each hinge unit needs to sit flush to the inside-top of the cabinet and sit flush with the front opening. Since I have 1.5" trim around the front of each cabinet, the trim over-hangs the top and side walls so that I need to add some spacers to fill in the clearance and position the hinges correctly.. Luckily, the trim on the top overhangs by a consistent 3/4" as they all line up with the ceiling. I just cut some small pieces of 3/4" plywood and glued one inside each top corner near the opening as shown above.
The vertical trim that covered the cabinet side-walls was a different story. Each of the cabinets are slightly different and the vertical trim pieces are also mounted in slightly different positions to cover edges of the plywood sides. The overhang distance to the left and right of the sides-walls are all different and ranged from 1/4" to 7/8". I can't just cut some common spacers out of a single thickness board to fill all of the gaps on the side-walls like I did for the spacers on the top.
So, what do you do when you need to make a number of spacers that are all different thicknesses? 3D Printer to the rescue!
My idea was to model a spacer in xDesign that is similar size and shape to the hinge assembly, and then print on my 3D printer. I based the thickness of the first spacer to match the clearance from the first of six locations and made sure it would be completely hidden behind the hinge assembly. I cut away zones in the model for the screws to go through and so that the spacer will be sandwiched between the hinge and the inside side-wall.
After modelling the first spacer based on the gap of first overhang on the far right. I printed it on my Creality printer. Then, I simply copied the part and changed the thickness for the second hinge/gap combo and printed that one. I did this for six unique spacers and added an embossed letter to each model to keep track of which spacer is for which side-wall location.
I used my nail gun to tack the spacers in place, then attached each hinge with 2 screws to secure them to the cabinets.
I cut a piece of scrap wood to test the hinge motion. This also helped me determine the final size for the doors. I ended up cutting down each door slightly to make them work with the hinges. Now the the walnut stiles and rails are 2.5" instead of 3" and I will have to carry this design forward into the four vertical doors.
I rounded the corners, did some final sanding, some touch up staining and applied 2 coats of poly urethane to each side of the 3 doors. I also routed a groove along the front inside edge of each door to allow you to get your thumb under the door to open it more easily.
Great to finally see some of the finished product!
Next steps:
- Finalize the vertical door design
- Build the 4 vertical doors
- Assemble with hardware
- Mount hanging bars