So you’ve got your cabinet bodies put together and your face frames all glued up and ready to go. The next step is easy… At least it will be if you measured everything down to at least 1/16″ and both the frames and the bodies are perfectly square. Did I mention how important it was to make sure all your work is square? Well if it is, the next step in putting your cabinet together is easy.
I’m going to use biscuits to attach the face frames to the cabinet bodies. There are a lot of ways to accomplish this, but biscuits have a lot of advantages over other methods. They are strong, they line up your face frames for you, and they’re fast and easy to use. A biscuit joiner is one of those tools that you might not need to use very often, so buying one might not be worth the money. However if you have a friend or family member who owns one (like I do) -borrow it. It’s something that just makes your life easier.
The first thing I did was borrow a page from good ol’ Norm Abrahm’s book of quick cabinet making. I used a 5/32″ slot cutting bit to cut the slots for the biscuits in the cabinet bodies. This step just allows me to put biscuits anywhere I feel like on the face frames and I don’t have to worry about lining up my slots with the other half of the joint. The only thing I don’t like about this method is how much wood it removes -Giving you less gluing surface, but I’ve found the joint is still plenty strong.
A 5/32" slot cutting bit set to the proper depth for my biscuit size...
Hard to see the slots in the edge of the plywood, but they're there...
Now this might not be clear just yet, but I designed my cabinets so that the bottom edge of the plywood will act as a door stop on the cabinet door. Now there is a problem with this design that I’ll go into in a later post, but I’m sticking with it in this cabinet. We won’t go over exactly how this will work just yet, but it means that I need to band the bottom edges of the cabinets. Easy enough to do. Hear are a few pics of the process.
Pre-glued maple edge banding.
Cut it length, and sneak out the wife's iron.
I bought this roller just for doing this. Not a "must have", but nice...
And this handy little tool trims the excess off the edges...
Now we’re ready to pull out the face frame and get it ready to mount. First I setup the biscuit joiner to the proper position so the edges of the cabinets will be even with the edges of the face frame.
Setting up so the cabinet body will be even with the edge of the face frame mounted to it.
Now that it's setup, the face frames are slotted for the biscuits...
I was in too much of a hurry to take any pictures, but next was the glue-up. I applied liberal amounts of glue the biscuits, the face frames , the cabinet body edges, and clamped everything together. The biscuits lined up everything perfectly. You can never have enough clamps!
I used those iron weights where the clamps wouldn't work...
