contemporary interior wood doors

marc: my mom has beenbugging me for months now to get the doors done onher laundry room cabinets. i installed them about a year ago so i guess it's probably timei should finish those up. that's what we're going to do today on the wood whisperer, we're going to makesome raised panel doors. (upbeat music) now as a well rounded woodworker

you probably should becomfortable with making a raised panel door. they're fairly common, you're going to see themon all types of cabinetry especially kitchen cabinets. in this case we're doinglaundry room cabinets to match the rest of the house. it's very important to know this technique but first let's look atthe anatomy of this door.

you've got your horizontal rails and your vertical stiles,okay it's a terminology. you also see it referred toas cope and stick joinery in terms of the type of joinery that holds these pieces together. the door itself we couldtake this apart here, nothing's glued up. the door itself is the raised panel. it's just the three quarter inch piece,

this happens to be hickory and you could see it's got this nice curve showing the actual raised material here and then we have a nice tenon essentially and this is going to allowthis panel, all solid wood to float in the grooves thatare cut into this piece. we can expand and contract safely without having any major wood movement issues later on.

now let's take a closer lookat the rail and stile pieces and see what we've actually done. this is one of our rail piecesand this is a vertical stile. now not only do they bothhave a groove cut in it okay and that's going tohouse the end of our panel. we've also got a decorativeedge on the inside all the way around and theone real important piece of joinery here is the factthat on the ends of the rails, check that out.

there's a little tenon okay and the negative ofthis profile edge here, you could see right there so that when you putthese pieces together, hopefully not backwards okay like this you get a perfect fit, right? now there's three bits that i use to make a raised panel door. you've got the raised panel bit

which i currently havein the router table, we'll look at that later on. the other two are therail and the stile bits, these two right here. now i've got three other bits because this is a fullkitchen cabinet making set. honestly i hardly evereven use these other two so let's take a closer lookat the rail and stile bit. that's where things get alittle bit confusing for people

because they look the same, i mean really they'repositive and negative of each other so that wecan get that tight joint in our rail pieces to our stile pieces. the one we're going to actuallydo the most cutting with is our stile bit. now i would recommend figuring out which one is which and then do what i did, mark one with an s and one with an r.

i think there's an sunder there, you see that? okay, and that makes sure that you're not going to getthis confused in the future. obviously only one can do the right job for the right piece but you don't want tofind out the hard way and go through a ton of practice pieces just to find that out, okay. this is the stile bit,

imagine this mounted in the router table and here we go with oneof our stile pieces. we could see how that profile is put so what we actually do is cut the groove for our panel and we havea nice decorative profile cut in our piece at the same time. now it's important torealize that this stile bit although we refer to it as the stile bit, it's also going to be used

to cut that same exact groove in profile on our rail pieces. we need that all the wayaround on all four pieces. now the rail bit is alittle bit different, the only place we'regoing to use the rail bit is on the ends of the rails, the end grain of the rails and you could see as you run that over, it would cut its profileinto the end like so

and then this profile fits perfectly over what we had cutpreviously with our stile bit. now setting up those router bits could seem like thehardest part of the project but in reality the most critical part is getting the numbersright from the start. we're going to over to the laundry room, take some measurements of the cabinets. i'm going to show you how using this set

and the properties of this set, remember yours might bea little bit different so consult your manual but i'm going to show you using my set what the measurements are and how i go from a certain size cabinet to specifically size the door parts. welcome to my mom's laundry room. i'm going to take some measurements

right off the cabinets themselves. we've got a standard face frame here and what i like to do is, first of all you got to figure out whatis the overlay of your doors and what i mean by overlayis the hinges themselves have properties. in fact you usually inscribewith what size they are that dictate how far over this frame the door is going to actually lay

because these are overlay doors. you can have a quarter inch, you could have three-eights inch, you could have half inch if you want. in this case i chose half inch overlay, so because i know my doorsare going to come out to a half inch on both sides. i wanted to mark that with a pencil, okay. i took my ruler, marka half inch line there,

another half inch in from the edge here then my final width from side to side is from pencil mark to pencil mark. you write that number down and that is our total widthof both doors put together. do that for each case andwe should be good to go. now that we know the totalwidth of our cabinet, we know that those two doors need to span that distance

so let's draw everything out. you got your cabinet here and we know that it has to be 30 and one-eighth across with two doors but i don't want thetwo doors to be budded right up against each other. i want a little bit of a space there so in between the doors, iwant a one-eight inch gap, so 30 and an eighth minus an eighth

leaves 15 for the left doorand 15 for the right door, nice even number. with the total of 15 inches across let's look at a single doorand draw out the profile, see what that's going to look like. each door has a verticalstile and a center panel, okay stile one, stile two center panel. now i know i want my stiles tobe two and a quarter inches. easy enough right?

if this total is 15 across,15 minus two and a quarter minus two and a quarter leaves us with a 10 and a half inchdistance in between our stiles. okay now where this can get confusing is that's actually notthe width of our panel. that's the distancebetween these two stiles. our panel floats in thegrooves that are cut into the stiles so the panel is actually, this dotted line representsthe second layer here.

the panel is actually goingto go into these grooves by whatever amount yourrouter bit is set for, what it is specified for. mine happens to be three-eighth so double check the literature or take a physicalmeasurement to figure out how deep it's going to cut that groove. in my case i've gotthree-eighths on that side, three-eighths on that side.

okay so three-eighths and three-eighths together is three-quarters of an inch, you want to add that to the 10 and a half giving me a total of 11and a quarter inches. now keep in mind that is themaximum width of this panel, we do want to leave a little bit of room, a little bit of breathingroom for that panel otherwise it's not goingto be able to expand and contract duringdifferent changes in humidity

and seasonal change. 11 and a quarter is the numberwe're going to shoot for and we're going to knock itdown probably an eighth shy but we're going to makesure that we have at least 11 and a quarter, wecould always trim it up after the panels are cut. now the vertical dimension happens to be a little bit easier. in the vertical dimensionwe've got another

piece up here that is our rail piece, our bottom rail piece and then you've got thepanel in the middle. now we know that totalfrom our measurement is 16 and a quarter inches. okay, we also know justlike with the stile pieces, two and a quarter inchesfor the two rail pieces so if we do the math, 16 and a quarter minus two and a quarter, two and a quarter

that's four and a half, okay that equals 11 and three quarters. 11 and three quarters nowagain is that distance between the rails, it's notthe full length of our panel. we need to again add in the fact that we have these grooves. same thing as the stiles, okay so we got three-eighths here, three-eighths here so11 and three quarters

plus another three-quarter total that's the addition of the three-eighths and the three-eighths gives us a total of 12 and a half inches. now that is the total length of our panel. now that one because wood wantsto expand across the grain, not with the grain. we don't have to be too concerned about wood movement in that direction.

if i get a number of 12 and a half, it could pretty much hit 12 and a half and be comfortable that it'snot going to blow out the frame some time down the linewhen the humidity picks up. now that we have thedimensions of our center panel, figuring out the dimensionsof the rails and stiles is no problem at all. stiles are the easiest because there's no tricky joinery,

nothing to worry about. the stiles length is theexact length of our door which is 16 and a quarter, we've got that marked here so that's the size we'regoing to cut those. the rails on the other hand though is can be a little tricky but we've already figured that number out because it's the same asthe width of that panel.

remember the router bit creates a tenon on the end of the rails that fits in to thatthree-eighths inch groove that we cut into our stile pieces. the number that we calculated here this 11 and a quarter that'sgoing to be the length of our rail pieces. the other key thing to keep in mind is i did say to trim thispanel down a little bit short

of 11 and a quarter, we're not going to do for the rail, we want that rail to be dead on exactly 11 and a quarter inches in length. the first thing we're goingto do is use our rail bit to cut the profile into theends of our rail pieces. let's check that in to therouter and get rolling. now to set the height of the bit, there's one thing that i'dlike to make sure we do

and that is keep a 16th inch leap here at the bottom of this piece. okay if you have that at 16th of an inch everything else just fallsin line in the right place. i've got my test piecehere that i cut earlier and that's going tomake it very easy for me to set this up so once you do thissave some of your scraps because they're goingto come in real handy

in the future for future set-up but if you don't have this set-up block, you basically just make a cut. do a test cut and keepmaking slight adjustments until you get to the finalnumber that you want. again i'm aiming forapproximately 16th of an inch, it's not absolutely critical, don't even get your measuring tape out, just get it close.

before we actually start therouting of the rail ends, we need to do a fewmore things to make sure we're set-up properly. now our bit here, you'll notice there's a really nice bearing on it, very thick bearing here at the center and that is to make surethat we don't go too far when we start running our piece through but that's not enoughsupport as you run this piece

across this way. it's a very dangerous thing so we need as much support as possible and what i do is bring my fence up and i usually loosen this three. i mean every fence is goingto be a little bit different but you want to close itin as close as you can to the bit itself tominimize the amount of a gap that's going to exist on both sides.

i get, i use the bearing as a guide and i put my ruler up against it, bring the fence forward, get it pretty close andi lock one side down. now i can pivot, okay so i restmy ruler all the way across and i bring it in just tothe point that it contacts then i tighten the other side down. now i can be prettyconfident that my bearing is in perfect alignmentwith both sides of my fence.

now cutting in such a heavy duty profile on the ends of this piece and running that through the router is an extremely dangerous ordeal. not to mention you could wind up with a lot of tear out at the back end. what i normally do to combat that is make sure that i havenice square piece of plywood and that's actually goingto be my support piece.

if you brush up you put therail piece up against that, now when i push this through, i've got the advantage ofall these extra support. i'll even tape this to my push block once in a while just to make sure it's not going to moveand as you go through you've got a lot more support, your hands are away from the cutting edge and this guy is not going togo flying off into the air.

now one thing that, this is something that it works well and that's howi've done it up to this point but i recently had a chance, excuse me to get a hold of this puppy. now this is nothing youcouldn't build at home, in fact i'd like toshow you all these parts so that you could see how it's made and couple hours on a weekend you could certainly make this yourself.

it's a piece of phenolicor the same material they make zero clearance inserts out of is the base here and of course we've got a nice handle, one of these toggle clamps and the backing sacrificial backing board. this is available at rockler and honestly as simple as it is you could build it yourself

but for the price i don'teven remember what it was. for the price it just seems like sometimes it is easier to justbuy these things pre-made. this, your work piece sitsright here in like so, and i like to use anotherblock to make sure i have it right to the end of the sled. once that's in place,i bring down the clamp, that locks in place and then this actually slides forward and back to give you

even that much more support and then you turn thehandle and lock it down. now we're talking theultimate and safety in support as the sled rides along the fence, we push it through and i've got two hands controlling this allthe way through the cut. this is what i'm going touse for my operation today. now one thing to keep in mind here, if you have a sled like this,

we set this up with theworkpiece sitting flat against the router table and if you have a sled like this you're going to raise it upby whatever the thickness of the sled is so be sure to raise your bit accordingly and do your set up with thismaterial under your workpiece because otherwise you're going to wind up getting the wrong cut.

now as you could seewe've got our coat cut in the end of our rail piece. you want to do this toall of your rail ends now. now we're installing the stile bit and we can cut our groove and profile into all four pieces for each door. the best way that i find to set the height of the stile bit is to usethe piece that we just cut so the end of our rail now

shows where this tenon is going to go. we know that this piece on our stile bit cuts the groove that goesall the way around our frame. if we match up this tenonwith that blade right there, we should have it exactlywhere it needs to be so let's go ahead and do that. i eyeball it the first time and make it pretty darn close by eye. then you make a practicecut, see how well it fits

and if you got a nice tight fit where the pieces are flush with each other you're good to go. now we're going to use the same procedure as before with the rulerto line up our fence. now we can double checkthe fit and our rails, fit our stiles quite nicely. when it's nice and flush right there, you don't feel a ridge,

that's when you knowyou get the right fit. now we have our raised panel bit mounted in the router. just a quick safety note again make sure that your routerspeed is adjusted properly for the diameter of thebit that you're using. you could see we have our profile and then the back cutter and in here the space that's left in hereis going to represent the ...

what's going to serve is the tenon, that's going to slide into the groove of our rails and stiles. now the only question in set up here is how high to bring this bit up and the way that i do that is i use one of our precut pieces from either the rail or the stile and use that for the height adjustment.

now i've got one of my railpieces here upside down, remember it has to be upside down and i want to line this tenonup with this space right here because we want the tenon of our panel to match the tenon on our rail piece. okay, so it is lined upbecause i checked it earlier but you could see ifyou lined it up by eye it's right where it needs to be and always cut a test piece first

just to confirm but thatlooks pretty darn good. for best results when routing your panels, always route the end grain first. this way subsequent cuts will clean up any resulting tear out. also don't try to route allthe material in one pass, instead route the panelin three to four steps moving the fence closer tothe final position each time. now assembling of the dooris pretty straight forward.

i lay my stile down, attach a rail, insert my door and the other rail andfinally the last stile. you got yourself a nice little door. a little bit of glue onthe rails and stiles, i might glue right in thisarea of the panel in the center but you don't want to glue the outsides because you want to let that panel float across the grain sothat it doesn't bust out

the frame later. now there are lot of variationson a raised panel door, standard framing panel doors and a lot of differentways that you can make them but hopefully this is going to serve as a good little primer for you so it's not so intimidating of a process, it's actually relatively easy compared to some thingsthat we do in the shop.

if you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me atmark@thewoodwhisperer.com. thanks for watching. (mellow music) welcome to my mom's laundry room where there's a wonderful aroma of downy mixed with kitty litter. (laughing) again make sure your speed is down to ...

i don't know remember what the number is. the plane. i'm not left handed. i've shown enough mistakes, i don't want to look like ... you know what i mean. voiceover: or an asshole. (laughs) you're funny.

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