Building, Fitting, and Hanging the Inset Cabinet Doors

Welcome back to the kitchen build. 

This time, I’m going to get into some doors, primarily these five doors for the uppers because they are hinged. These doors have a flat panel with an ogee detail running around the perimeter of the panel. 

Here is a cross-section of a door. You can see it has a top, middle and bottom rail, and the sizes of those rails are a little bit different. 

First I’m going to make all of my stile and rail stock, using some maple that I have. I’ve made some different sizes and lengths because I have a variety of door sizes to make. 

Before I cut everything to length, I want to do all of my edge profiling. This is the bit that I have to cut that ogee. 

Here’s all the parts with the profiles and grooves cut. Now I can cut things to length. 

For the joinery, I’m going to do a fully integrated mitered profile with a full tenon on it, which is how I would do it if I was making a piece of furniture. This piece will be fully integrated into the rails and stiles. This way you don’t have to worry about glue failing over time or the moulding loosening up. Also, because I’ll be putting a full tenon on there, I’ll have some actual connection in the corner to make them nice and rigid. 

I’m going to get some mortises cut before I start forming the tenons so that I have a final size to try the tenons on. 

With some of those cut, I’m going to cut some tenons. 

The last thing the rails need is for the ogee profile to be mitered so that it transitions into the stile nicely. Then I have to miter the stiles as well. 

Now that I’ve got the end rails done on the stiles, next I have to make the area here in the middle to receive the midrail. 

I’ve got all of the door frames built out now. Now I can work on the panels. 

The panel thickness is a half inch, and I want to use a moisture-resistance product or an exterior product on these upper doors. The problem is that those don’t come in half-inch thicknesses. They come in 3/8 and they come in 3/4. So I could either use a 3/4-inch product and plane it to a half inch, or I can switch to a 3/8-inch thickness. 

Here is how the backside of the door looks with a 3/8, which I think looks just fine and saves me a lot of time. 

I’m going to do some pre-finishing to make painting easier because it’s a lot easier to fill and sand and finish prep everything as an individual rail versus as a whole door. 

For the glue-ups, I’m using epoxy with a bit of silica to thicken it up. I’m using epoxy because it gives me more working time, and it also works as a filler so I won’t have to go back and fill in the gaps. I’m glueing the panels in as well so that they become a structural component of the doors. 

All right, these are cured, out of the clamps, and cleaned up, so now I’m ready to hang and fit these doors. The process I have for this is the same as hanging an inset door and butt hinges on a piece of furniture. The biggest thing is that there is zero adjustability, and the hinges set everything. So the whole process is based around getting the door figured out to the geometry of the opening, getting it onto the hinges, and then doing a little bit of fine tuning and setting the final gaps at the end. So the first thing I’m going to do here in the shop is start setting the gap that’s going to be on the hinge side. 

So I want to remove the desired gap from that stile as well as half of the overall overage that the door has in width. So my door is 1/8 of an inch wider than the opening; therefore, I want to take half of that off of the hinge stile and the other half will come off of the other stile. Then I’ll remove a little bit of a starting point from the other stile, and I’m going to bevel the blade at one or two degrees so that the back corner’s out of the way as the hinge swings into the opening.

Now I can layout and mortise the hinges in. 

With the door on the hinges, I can reassess fit. The one is contacting at the bottom and rubbing a little bit. 

Now that I have those doors on here for now, I’m going to install the knobs to make sure that we like the position. That way, if we don’t like the position, it’s a lot easier to plug the hole now before it gets painted. 

So there are all the upper doors! I also got the doors installed on the china hutch. With the doors in here, it makes this space look almost done, even though it’s not. 

That was a lot of work. Of everything you’ve seen me do so far, this was the most amount of work, but really happy with how it turned out! Thank you, as always, for joining, I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on the home renovation, the kitchen, or whatever, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. And until next time, happy woodworking!