So yesterday I decided to sand my face 4 frames and drill 384 holes for
shelf pins. Not wanting to get started too early I ate lunch first and
then spent from 12:00 to 4:00 pm in the heat doing that.
I quit for the afternoon and noticed the digital garage thermometer said
100 degrees.
This particular project has 4 cabinets which all have my usual front and
back face frames. Each cabinet has a left and right half so that there
is a center cabinet panel running from top to bottom and doubling the
amount of shelf pin holes. The 384 were just for the upper cabinets
that I am working on now.
Each of the upper cabinets have 5 plywood panels to form the carcass,
and two face frames. Each rail and stile in both face frames have
groves to receive the carcass panels, so that is a total of 10 groves
that have to work together to receive the panels. On top of that the
carcass panels lock into each other with 6 dado's. All groves are cut
on each of the face frame rails and stiles before the face frame
assembly. Location of the center stile and top and bottom rails is
critical so that their dados align with the ones on the plywood panels.
Soooo, on all X,Y,Z axis's of the assembly there are 16 dados and groves
that have to fit "perfectly". As all of us progress with our
woodworking skills we learn to build things so that we insure that
things come out right and or have a way to hide imperfection behind
moldings. In this case there is no hiding a F-up. And you basically
don't know if it will all fit together until all cuts are made and the
face frames are assembled. Front and back face frame parts are not
interchangeable. This always has my utmost attention until after the
dry fit. Last night the dry fit went perfectly.
Glue up this morning was a bit of another matter altogether. It was a
chilly 95 degrees so both fans were blowing and naturally this tends to
make the exposed glue set up more quickly. While not normally a big
issue, parts of the assembly start to "stick" much sooner so a slight
adjustment to fit pieces in is next to impossible. And all of the gets
glued up all at once. Every thing goes fine until the last plywood
panel has to go in and the top panel is literally 1/32" out of alignment.
Using 3 clamps to persuade a panel to move 1/32" after sitting in a 48"
long glued groove requires "attention". But move, it did, and
everything looks fine. Last step attach the front face frame, and with
every thing perfectly aligned it settles right in place with no issues.
The final glue up happens in 2 steps. The back face frame lays raised,
face down, on a work surface, All groves are glued and then the dados
in the 5 panels are glued and set into the groves in the face frame.
Last step is to glue all the groves in the front face frame and fit on
top of the assembly and clamp.
The whole glue up involves 372" of glued groves and dados. No time to
stop and think....
The cabinet is a half inch shy of being 4' x 4' and 17" deep.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lcb112...posted-public/
And a ton of clamps.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lcb112...posted-public/