When beginning this next section of building custom cabinets I am going to talk about important steps and methods to building custom cabinets like an expert. I am going to start in this article by talking about cutting the borders for where your molding is going to go. If you use the same bit in your jig you will never have to make a different cut throughout your molding. That makes layout really simple. So I am going to be making a dado that is four inches up from the bottom but first I am going to back up, not four inches from the bottom I usually go three and seven eighths because it’s a lot of work to get that face frame to line up exactly with the plywood shelf. Especially with the base custom cabinets. There’s really no need to do that. Next what I am going to do is put some marks up at about 3 and 7/8 and then I am just going to quickly clamp this jig to my piece of plywood and I’ll make that real shallow dado using the router to make a straight line for my custom cabinets. I am going to use a ¾ inch router bit and I am going to use it to make that eighth inch dado. There’s all sorts of specialty router bits that you can get because everyone knows plywood’s not ¾ anymore which make it easier to make custom cabinets. Some people get really hung up on that but for me I’d rather have too wide of a dado because for me that data was just to conceal my joint not for strength and then my boxes of my custom cabinets always go together really easy because I’ve got a little extra room to deal with so for me I’m just going to use a three quarter inch router bit and make a nice shallow cut of course you want to sharp router bit too so that doesn’t tear up the plywood for the custom cabinets. That completes this step for the custom cabinets. In the next article we will follow through with these steps in making custom cabinets. The multi-leveled layout is a very popular request and it allows the custom cabinets to be both a area where it can be a counter-top as well as a place where you can eat with added bar stools. The stools were purchased at a Micheal's near where we built the custom cabinets.
Burled Walnut
Burled Walnut