#Inset panels door veeer portable#

Start with the door sized to fit snug in the opening. This size gap accommodates seasonal wood movement and potential binding, and it suits most drawer slides, which have a bit of play in them. Dial in your shims and mortisesįor cabinets with solid-wood door frames and traditional butt hinges, aim for a 1⁄8-in. Another subtle detail I like is that the bottom door rails, which don’t get trimmed, end up slightly wider than the top ones.

#Inset panels door veeer portable#

Compact and portable yet extremely accurate, it’s often the first tool I recommend to people asking for guidance when setting up shop.įollowing the steps in this article will ensure that all your doors and drawers have consistent reveals around them, giving your cabinetry a very refined look. If you don’t own a track saw, I hope this article helps convince you of its value. The calipers help me size the wood shims I use to position the door in the opening and mark its edges, and the track saw makes clean, precise trim cuts at my pencil marks. There are two tools at the heart of my approach: a set of digital calipers and a track saw. In this article, I’ll take you through the steps for mounting a door with butt hinges. The method I use now removes the guesswork and the many trips back and forth from the tablesaw or bench to creep up on the right reveal for each edge. I was never satisfied with the process, and was always looking for a more streamlined and repeatable approach. Most of the door-fitting techniques I learned early on involved some combination of using a large sled on the tablesaw, educated guesswork for shimming the door on the sled, and carefully tuned hand planes. Using a butt hinge-with no adjustability-adds another level of difficulty, requiring that you trim and mount your door perfectly the first time. Wood moves, face frames shift during glue-up, and uneven clamping pressure can leave doors slightly out of square. Things would be easier if you were fitting perfect rectangles into other perfect rectangles, but that often isn’t the case with custom cabinetry. The challenge with inset doors lies in the way they are boxed in on all sides, allowing your eye to pick up the slightest differences in the reveals. You’ve put a lot of time and effort into the project, and now you have one chance to fit each door with even reveals-the gaps between the door and the face frame. Many of us approach our first set of these doors with trepidation, however. W hether you’re building a piece of furniture or a kitchen’s worth of cabinets, there’s no substitute for the clean look of inset doorswith traditionally mortised butt hinges. Stefan Straka explains that when you mount a cabinet door with butt hinges, there are two tools that are key: a set of digital calipers and a track saw. Synopsis: Inset doors offer a clean look for furniture or cabinets.