En la entrada anterior vimos cómo hacer puertas de armario pequeñas. Son para una armario de mi taller de carpintería, y las hice uniendo con tubillones los largueros y los travesaños de las puertas. Ahora quiero fresar una ranura en el interior para poner los paneles. Y como la facilidad o dificultad de instalar puertas depende muchas veces del tipo de bisagras que queremos poner, yo voy a instalar las puertas en el armario con unas bisagras fáciles de poner.
How to install flat panel to base cabinet doors
I need to hold the doors somehow so they don’t move when routing the grooves. Then, I dry assemble the door frames, and I make a simple template on a board to fit and hold the doors. Like this, by screwing a few pieces of wood strips around the door frame, the door will not move and it will be easy to route the groove on the inside edges.
But the ball-bearing router bit that I’m going to use to route the slots would trip over the wooden base of the template, so I raise the door frame on some thin pieces of wood strips. Just enough so that the slot cutter router bit does not trip over the base, but so that the door frame still fits into the template.
Then I adjust the position of the slot cutter to route a groove centered on the edge of the rails and stiles of the doors. And I route a groove on the inside edge of all the base cabinet doors. I have to keep in mind, for when I make the panels, that the slots I just routed are rounded on the inside of the corners, with a radius equal to the radius of the slot cutter router bit.
I now measure and cut the flat panels to close the opening of the doors frame. The height of the flat panels should be the height of the door opening plus twice the depth of the groove. And I subtract a couple of millimeters to make sure the flat panels will fit with no problems. And the width should be the width of the door opening plus twice the depth of the slot. But I cut them by a couple of millimeters shorter.
In any case, to avoid surprises, it is advisable to dry fit the flat panels before gluing them, just to check they fit correctly.
Los paneles los corto de un tablero de marquetería con un grueso igual al de la ranura. Y con la lijadora de disco les redondeo las esquinas para que encajen bien en las esquinas redondeadas de las ranuras que acabo de fresar.
And finally I install the flat panels and put the doors in the base cabinet. The solid wood raised panels I think are not usually glued, but I usually glue these thin plywood panels and they never gave me problems. So in addition to gluing the joints with dowels, I also apply a thin bead of carpenter’s glue in the grooves.
Y utilizo mis sargentos largos de carpintero para mantener presionadas las uniones mientras se seca la cola.
How to put the hinges and install the base cabinet doors
I will put hinges that are very easy to install. These have little points on the base that allow to mark the position in which we want to place them. So, once we have the hinges where we want them, we press them against the wood. And now I can put the hinges back in the same place by just fitting the points into the marks.
Then, to install these base cabinet hinges, first I measure and mark their position on the edge of the doors.
I remove the hinge pin, which in this model comes out very easily, I put the part of the hinges that goes on the edge of the doors in place, and screw them.
Now I want to screw the hinges to the base cabinet frame. And for that I have to reassemble the hinges with their pin.
When making these cabinet doors I made sure to make them a little smaller than the base cabinet opening. So I now I have to put a piece of cardboard to shim the doors, trying to keep them from rubbing against the base cabinet at the top and bottom.
I present the doors in position, and press the hinges so that the points leave the mark in their position on the cabinet frame.
I disassemble the hinge pin again and screw the corresponding halves to the cabinet frame. And once I have them screwed on, to finish installing the hinges I have to fit the hinges halves that I have in the doors to the hinges halves that I have in the base cabinet. And I put the hinges pins back in.
You may already know that installing hinges is often a headache, but some types of hinges make things easy 🙂 .
In order not to complicate the locking system of the doors, I can install some magnets like those for kitchen cabinets.
I still need to drill some holes to put some wooden handles to be able to open and close the cabinet doors …
And I check that I can open and close the cabinet doors without any problems. I think installing hinges like these was a wise decision, because besides being very easy to put, they work very well, which makes installing cabinet doors like these a simple task.
The only problem I have after installing the doors is that they rub a little (wait, what? 🙁 ). Okay, this happens because this large base cabinet is a little crooked and its corners are not perfect at 90 degrees. I could trim the doors a bit, but being a shop cabinet I don’t mind them rubbing a bit. And I’d rather do that than risk leaving them too loose.
