The making of this small display cabinet for the lead knight collection is progressing slowly. It’s time to make the door, and although I use methods and techniques that I’ve used in other posts, I wasn’t going to skip making the corresponding entry.
The most complicated part when making a door can be deciding what size to make it. I was never very sure how much to adjust the door to the sides of a piece of furniture, and when I wanted to adjust it too much, I ended up needing to sand the sides to make it fit or to prevent it from rubbing too much. Perhaps to the very meticulous, this may seem exaggerated, but I decided to leave a one-millimeter gap around to avoid problems, especially with the opening system I will use. I think with harder wood than this, I could be a bit more precise, but with my experience with the wood I usually use and balancing my skill in adjusting doors, I decided to stay on the safe side.
To join the center strip, I use the same system I used with the sides of the display cabinet. The problem is that now the strip is longer than the height of my drill press. The base and head of these vertical drills are usually attached to the central column with a single screw, which is easy to loosen with the corresponding size Allen key. We just have to place the base of the drill sideways on the edge of the table and secure it firmly, loosen the screw of the base or the head, and turn the head so that it overhangs on that side of the table. This way, we can take advantage of the height of the table to drill the head of the strips that are too long.
As I mention in the video, my first intention was to reinforce the corners made with 45º joints with a couple of dowels, but after drilling all the corners, fully confident that they would fit well, it turned out that the sides of the joint were not at the same level. I should have done just one corner to see how it turned out; it would have saved me some work. But there are days when you think everything will go well and then it doesn’t.
After recovering from the disappointment, I decided to glue one of those small dowels into each hole and cut them flush with the surface (if you look at the video, when I glue the pieces, you can see the dowels leveled with the surface where I apply the carpenter’s glue. And in the photo, you can see how they were misaligned). And finally, I glued the miter joints directly without any further reinforcements. Once the glue dried, I used the circular saw to cut some slots in the corners to insert some pieces of veneer and thus reinforce them, but we will see this in a future post.
Everything about how to make this wooden display cabinet