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Landing face-frame cupboard

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Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby RogerS » 27 Jun 2016, 18:42

This is the next project. Behind this MDF is pretty grotty lath and plaster and not worth keeping exposed. Also the MDF hides the feed and expansion pipes for the central heating system. As an aside, I got fed up keep going up into the loft to turn off the water supply whenever I was doing any work and so, before I put the MDF carcass in, I'd fitted two fullbore 22mm valves in both pipes. I carefully marked up where they were in relation to the back panel intending to drill a couple of screwdriver access holes in the back panel. That was before LOML painted it over and I lost my reference marks :evil:

I'm intending to fit a face-frame and door made from elm to match the existing doors nearby. I say match but a bit tricky as the elm in these doors is quite reddish-brown but the grain is 'elm-y' and I have no reason to think it is any other type of wood. I stupidly forgot to drill some pocket holes in the carcass before I fitted it in place and so actually fitting the face-frame is going to be interesting...all ideas very welcome.

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The cupboard is vertical (honest!)

It's quite tall - 2200mm - and I don't have any elm that long and so I've decided to make up the face-frame like this.

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I also had some wide elm that I'd prepped for the project and would quite like to use these as the door panels. They are quite thick - 14mm or so - and so mulling over how to make the shaker style doors. Two of the panels are shown in the SketchUp drawing.

And here they are - nestling on the casting couch in my study - they have kept remarkably flat since I prepped them up - mainly due to the fact that they are incredibly dry.

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The challenge will be making it all out of the odd bits and pieces of elm that I've got.
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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby RogerS » 17 Jul 2016, 09:39

So these are my odds and ends of elm.
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The challenge is trying to make the most of all the small bits and pieces but keeping track of them all is tricky. You can look at one piece and think 'I can get two frame rails, one cupboard door stile and a rail out of that'. And 'I can get a stile from that piece'. So how do you identify what's coming out of what? Dead easy when you have a pile of 4 x 2 but bits and pieces ? I still haven't found out the best way of doing this. Any ideas? I also toyed with the idea of trying to get a door bottom rail, the frame midrail then the top rail of the adjacent door out of the one piece so that there was cohesion in the design and ditto the door and frame stiles but lost the plot while figuring out what to get from where. The one consistency in the design is that I tend to always work to 20mm thick.

I write on the surface as to what it's destined for but then lose those when you plane and thickness. Write on the end? And lose that information when you cut to length !

While mulling things over I did come across this length of elm that would be long enough for the frame stiles.

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But a quick 'ping' with a chalk line told me it was not to be.

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So back to Plan A.

OK...having worked out the cutting plan I planed and thicknessed the relevant pieces down to my 200mm. Left them overnight and the next day, I started ripping some of the longer 1300mm pieces down for the middle frame stile and door stiles. And, as I started to relieve the tension in the wood, bananas :cry:

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Lots of them

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In all directions

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Anyone spotted the oddman out yet ?

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The key thing now is to leave them be and go and do something else,

To be continued
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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby Jimmy Mack » 17 Jul 2016, 10:25

That chalk line snap is a top tip!

A tricky board, Roger... the sapwood, waney edge and switch from QTR to radial grain - a tough match.

Marking out wise, similar to you, I mark my components on the board, cut short planer manageable lengths asap (especially if it's a difficult board with multiple deviations)...then as soon as I can get a face & edge on I get some marks back on... of course, when it's a 'quick' home project these marking out procedures inevitably go out the window... resulting in a bucket of firewood

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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby Malc2098 » 17 Jul 2016, 12:29

My three ha'pence worth - would it be possible to draw all the short pieces of stock into Sketchup and then move the styles and rails drawings over them till you find a good and efficient fit?

I appreciate there has to be some way of identifying each pieces of stock, especially if the ID marks get machined off. I'm inclined to agree with the post above and that disciplined marking and remarking is necessary, but difficult to achieve when you haven't got a length of time to maintain continuity.
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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby RogerS » 17 Jul 2016, 12:53

Malc2098 wrote:My three ha'pence worth - would it be possible to draw all the short pieces of stock into Sketchup and then move the styles and rails drawings over them till you find a good and efficient fit?


Good suggestion and I have sometimes done that in the past but mainly for flat stock and using the Cutlist plugin. More tricky in this case as there are some parts in each piece that are too bad to use. As will become clear shortly :D
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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby Woodbloke » 17 Jul 2016, 21:40

RogerS wrote:So these are my odds and ends of elm.
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The challenge is trying to make the most of all the small bits and pieces but keeping track of them all is tricky. You can look at one piece and think 'I can get two frame rails, one cupboard door stile and a rail out of that'. And 'I can get a stile from that piece'. So how do you identify what's coming out of what? Dead easy when you have a pile of 4 x 2 but bits and pieces ? I still haven't found out the best way of doing this. Any ideas?


When you've found the answer to that conundrum Rog, please let me know :D - Rob
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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby RogerS » 18 Jul 2016, 10:50

Overnight my bananas have become more EU-shaped and so I'll leave them a bit longer and see if they carry on straightening up. Meanwhile I'm going to press a 'spare' board into use. This one has a number of shakes, some of which are quite deep and also some large knotholes of varying structural integrity. As I don't want to run the risk of running out of wood, I'll do my usual strengthening exercise and fill them all with epoxy. This means that I can then cut and machine the board with impunity. The colour of the epoxy is not a bad match TBH once sanded back.

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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby RogerS » 19 Jul 2016, 10:07

The wood's finally settled down and straightened up a fair bit. As the central door pane is quite sturdy at 14 mm thick I can use the long pieces that aren't quite straight enough as door stiles and use the worst piece on the hinge side, use four small hinges to fix to the frame stiles and that should be enough to keep it under control. Or I can use the same pieces for the frame stiles and rely on whatever fixing means I adopt (still deciding) to the carcass. Really comes down to what the wood looks like when combined with the panel.

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Decision made, it's now time to start making the frame and it is at this point that I narrowly avoided making a mega-cockup. Mitres are always 45 degrees, aren't they? :eusa-think: No!........not the ones at the mid-points of the frame. A quick visit to SketchUp told me that they were 26.5 degrees...Lucky escape.

How to accurately cut them? Consistently. Make a jig. I need something to keep the timber stable and held down a 90 degree datum line, then adjust the mitre saw until I get a 26.5 degree mitre, lock it off. Then I can feed in all the pieces, flipping them over as and when and so get my consistency. I had an existing old sled and simply glue-gunned the support in place at 90 degrees.
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Need to do a few trial runs to get the angle spot-on...one good reason for keeping all those offcuts.

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All went according to plan apart when part way through I overdid the sawing and sliced through the backstop that wasn't held down as securely as I thought in the original sled. Another judicious use of glue-gun and we're back running.
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Screws ? Who needs screws ? Seriously, the glue-gun was the right choice as it meant that I could fix the problem without having to remove the jig which had been carefully clamped in place. You only need a smidgeon ...an unbelievably small smidgeon before mitres go all to cock DAMHIKT.

And looking not too bad...a key test is to line up a straight-edge down the side and some very slight inconsistency meant that a fine fill of coloured wax would be needed.
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Getting there....
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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby RogerS » 19 Jul 2016, 13:10

Where were we? Oh yes, mitreing. Damn tricky.

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Long story short. Finished cutting the 26.5 degree ones then tackled the 45 degree ones in the four outside corners of the frame, dry-assembled it all. Oh woe...thrice woe...so so tricky to get them all to fit ...what to do? Trim a bit off one then that throws out a joint somewhere else...I hate mitres !! Solution. Domino. Glue. Severe clamping. Knock, bodge, twist, curse it into some sort of reasonable shape.

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Note the straight edge as a clamping guide.

Time to cut the stock for the doors. The workshop is cooler than the house.
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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby RogerS » 21 Jul 2016, 11:41

A few more notes about the frame glue-up. All the pieces were Domino'd together. Because of the limited space at the junctions of the 26.5 degree mitres, there wasn't enough room for two Domino's - one from either side. My solution was to insert into one side one of my 'assembly' Domino's, fit the joint together and then recut the Domino from the other side. That cuts a profile out of the other Domino such that when a whole Domino is put in place on the other side, it will slot into the nick in the other. I took each of the 'assembly' Dominos and used them as templates for the proper Domino's and cut the profile - adding a bit extra to give some wiggle room - on the wee bandsaw. The important thing is making sure that you insert the Domino the right way up when you glue up. This is VERY important. DAMHIKT :oops:

Regarding the doors, nothing much to report here other than the fact that I cocked up a little with the measurements :oops:
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Just means that the gap between door and frame will be a little larger than I usually make them.

I Domino'd the door rails and stiles and glued up the frame checking for wind. When it was dry I simply rebated the back so that the panels would drop in

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and glued the whole lot up with a load of clamps to make sure that those wayward and still slightly twisty stiles were anchored down as much as possible.
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I also noticed that there were some strange shakes developing in the rear face of the panels and so yet again , using my trusty epoxy mix, let it seep into the shakes to give some longterm stability.
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Returning to the question of fixing the face frame to the carcass I looked at the two side panels and came to the conclusion that the righthand side was straight enough (it was packed out away from a very uneven wall and so there were some inevitable diversions from a perfectly straight edge by 0.5 - 1 mm as the carcass was screwed into place) that I could Domino the frame on that side referencing off the inside face of the carcass and the inside face of the face frame.
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One point worth making was that I made damn sure that the Domino depth-of-cut would not pierce through the front of the faceframe. Made all the easier by a rule I make myself follow which is to store the Domino machine always with the depth-of=cut set to its minimum.

As far as the lefthand side was concerned, the width of the faceframe was too wide to use the inside face of the carcass as a reference face...that would have been too simple and also not helped y the fact that the lefthand carcass face was not 100 % parallel with the right face ..again down to the challenges placed by having another uneven surface to which the lefthand carcass side would be fixed. The solution was to fit Domino's in the right hand frame side, fit in place temporarily, run a pencil up the inside of the left side of the face frame and then use that as the reference line for the dominos, adjusting the machine for each one and doing an awful lot of trial cuts!

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I also quickly realised that I actually didn't need to make a full depth cut for the trials.

It then came down to a question of offering up the face frame gradually adding dominos on the LH side. It was at this point that I changed how I was going to finally fix the frame. Originally the plan was to glue it in place but as I like to have get-outs a preferable way would be to avoid doing that and so I decided that if I glued just the Domino into the faceframe then I could use a few small screws through the inside face of the carcass and into the domino that was inserted in as the faceframe was offered up.

But even that plan was set aside as I subsequently found that the friction and tight fit of the Dominos meant that once fitted the face frame stayed in place.
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And that's about it.

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Job's a good'un, I reckon. Thanks for looking.

And now it's finished, surely someone can see the error ?
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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby Malc2098 » 21 Jul 2016, 12:02

Proper job, as the locals say down here!

Can't see any with these glasses!!

Well done.
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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby Andyp » 21 Jul 2016, 13:42

Good job Roger, you will be long gone before anyone else notices the error.

Bearing in mind the complications with the mitred rails in the face frame why did you not just M & T them?
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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby TrimTheKing » 22 Jul 2016, 12:08

Andyp wrote:Good job Roger, you will be long gone before anyone else notices the error.

Bearing in mind the complications with the mitred rails in the face frame why did you not just M & T them?


His length wasn't long enough to reach all the way down on both sides… ooer Mrs! :? :lol:

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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby Andyp » 22 Jul 2016, 13:11

Ah yes, I can see that now. good solution.
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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby RogerS » 22 Jul 2016, 13:34

Andyp wrote:Ah yes, I can see that now. good solution.


:)

No-one has spotted that I accidentally mixed up my wood and after I'd prep'd it and was cutting it to length I realised that what I thought was elm was, in fact, English walnut.
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Re: Landing face-frame cupboard

Postby Rod » 22 Jul 2016, 15:10

Whatever it looks good

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