House Remodeling - Frameless Cabinets With a Traditional Look

The traditional look I'll build here is a full-overlay frame-and-panel door. Full-overlay doors cover the edges of the case, as opposed to half-overlay doors, which leave part of the case's edges exposed. If I were building a
traditional cabinet with a face frame, I might leave that frame totally visible by using inset doors, which hang within the face-frame openings. But faceframe cabinets with inset doors and drawers are tougher to build and give you less storage space than the frameless cabinets I'll build in this article.

Loose-tenon joints are quick and strong — In my small shop, I build doors first because they take up less space than cases. If I built the cases first, I'd be wallowing in them as I built the doors.

When I build a frame-and-panel door or drawer face, I join stiles and rails (the vertical and horizontal parts of the frame) with a loose-tenon butt joint. This joint is as strong as a conventional mortise and tenon, yet it takes much less time to execute because I don't need any special tools, just a router and a table saw. In this joint the rails butt into the stiles, and both members are mortised so that a separate tenon may be slipped into these mortises like a dowel. After assembling the frames, I rabbet the inside edge, drop in a panel and hold it in place with panel molding. I use 5/4 stock for frames not just because it looks good but also because the thickness gives more bearing surface for clamping. The thinner the stock, the more likely it is that a clamp may pull a frame out of flat. After jointing and planing the stock, I rip it into in. widths, then cut it to length on a chopsaw.

There's a 1/16-in. reveal all the way around the door or drawer face, which means its size equals the case dimensions minus 1/8 in. If I'm hanging two doors in a single opening, the doors will be half the case width minus 1/8 in. Because the rails butt into the stiles, the rails are cut 5 in. less than the overall widths just cited. I save a few cutoffs for setting up the mortising fixture.

Mortising fixture locates mortises accurately—With the best faces of the stiles and the rails facing me, I set the frames on a flat surface and mark across the center of each rail onto the stile. These marks indicate where mortises will go. The ends of the rails and the top and the bottom edges of the stiles get mortised.

I do the mortising with a fixture that I designed for use with a plunge router I clamp a stile or a rail in the fixture and then run the router against the fixture's stop blocks to cut an oblong mortise. I make all my mortises starting in. from the edges of the stock. Any less, and I could open up the mortise when routing the outside edge detail. Typically, mortises are 3/8 in. wide, 1/16 in. deep and 1 ^3/4 in. long.

Pare down tenons until they just slip into mortises—Because the tenons are buried in the frames, they don't have to be pretty. They do, however,have to be strong and stable, so I make tenons from poplar, an inexpensive hardwood. I rip tenons from 4/4 stock on the table saw, deliberately ripping them about 1/16 in. thicker than the mortise. The strength of a loose-tenon joint comes from a tenon of perfect thickness. I get precisely the right thickness by thinning tenon stock on a table saw or a planer until the tenon just slips into the mortise with light force. The tenon's length and the width aren't as critical, so these dimensions are undersized to allow for glue runout and to compensate for any imperfections. I round over all edges of the tenon stock with a 3/16 in. roundover bit in the router and cut the tenons in 2-in. lengths.

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