Woodworking On The Cheap

Over the last few weeks we’ve been busy in the Woodworking Cheap shop creating shaker style frame and panel doors for a large cabinet refacing job. Since this is a hobby for us, and we don’t have gobs of money to throw at the problem, we decided to do our own cabinet doors. The final cost per door turned out to be something like $7 on average, which was less than half the cost of ordering the doors from a professional cabinet refacing service.

If you can stomach the time spent, take the time to be careful, and fabricate the rail coping jig, you can save yourself a lot of money doing it yourself. At Woodworking On The Cheap we’ve been documenting our process, sharing our tools, and now it’s time to share our experiences.

The first thing we did was decide on a style of frame and panel door. My wife and I like the look of the flat-panel “shaker” style doors. It helps that it’s incredibly easy to produce doors in this style. Cut your rails, cut your stiles, slide a 1/4″ thick piece of veneered plywood in place, and you’re done! No need to cut copes on a table saw, no huge 3″ wide router bit sets, and a clean look that we find attractive.

These doors can be made on nothing more than a table saw. I’ve done a few in this style like that. But since I was going to be making a LOT of these doors, I opted to use a rail and stile router bit set. This allowed for more consistency in the cuts, and eliminated the need to run each piece through the saw twice to center the groove. It also greatly simplified the process of cutting the rail tenons. Using the jig makes it easy, safe, reliable, and eliminates many ways you can screw things up.

I spent quite a bit a time prepping the stock. Everything was thickness planed, ripped to the proper width, then jointed on both ends. I then cut the rails to the finished length (including the tenon), and cut the stiles to be at least an inch (most of the time I used two inches) longer than they needed to be. This is an important detail, and we’ll visit the reason for this later on.

In the next part, we’ll visit calculating the door sizes based upon cabinet opening measurements.