Making door and drawer parts (installment 2)

After a relaxing day on Christmas, it was back to work in the basement! Probably for the better: it's cold outside!

To recap: on Christmas Eve, I cut all the pieces to length and ripped to finished width. I also finished the cope cuts on all of the rails and sorted all of the rails and stiles for the next step, cutting the groove for the 1/4" plywood panel.

About 80 parts, ready for routing

Today, I dialed in the groove-cutting router bit to match the thickness of the tongue made during the cope cut. Definitely a lot of fiddling around to find the right combination of spacer washers to have a nice fit, then adjusting the router bit height to match the cuts made earlier. It's always good to have extra scrap parts made just for these purposes.

Once everything was dialed in, I set the router table up with three featherboards and brought a push stick over.

Router table, set to cut grooves

Cutting grooves is pretty easy with a router table. My 2 1/4 HP Bosch router handled the task without too much complaining:

After about three hours of total time, all of the rails and stiles had grooves milled into them. Here's some evidence of progress:

Completed stiles and rails. This stack is mostly for drawers.

More completed parts - rails for cabinet doors

After finishing milling all the pieces, I sorted all of the rails and stiles to make matched sets of parts. This was to confirm I had all the needed parts (which I didn't have) and to better grasp what was ahead of us. Spoiler alert: a lot of painting.

Here's a shot of the results of today's work: a finished drawer front. The tongues fit tightly inside the grooves. I'll still have to use the belt sander to smooth out a few imperfections (between 1/32 and 1/64"), but overall, not too shabby. We are very happy with the results!

Next up: door panels. Looking at the forecast above, I wasn't going to be outside breaking down plywood in this cold today. Plus, there was plenty to do inside. However, keep things moving, I'll have to brave the cold tomorrow. Good thing I have plenty of warm clothes and relatively few cuts to make. More on that later...