Final Sanding, Face Shelves and Drill Shelf pin holes.

I took yesterday off and went to the Sports Show in Anderson with our neighbors from Lake Almanor.  Had a great time and the show was pretty good to boot.

Today I finished facing the shelves with a 3/4"x 1 1/2" strip of alder.  I drilled shelf pin holes in all the cabinets that need shelves and did the final sanding on all 24 cabinets.   I finished about 4:00PM and then cleaned up the shop, vacuumed up all the sawdust (a full 33 gal bag) and got the shop ready to start making doors and finished ends.  Sanding is kind of like cleaning the toilets in my book of fun stuff.  Doors, drawer fronts and drawer boxes are next on the list.

The fan helped the glue dry a little faster.  You never have enough clamps.

Packing tape works if you can't figure how to clamp it.

The building process.

Sorry I've been asleep at the blog, but I have been busy building cases.  Today I will outline the building process and all the steps involved in building kitchen cabinets.

Design
Ordering sheet stock, board stock and hardware.
The computer program nests all 24 cabinets and produces cut sheets for the 22 sheets of birch plywood for the cases.  The first day in the shop consists of cutting case parts, labeling and stacking by cabinet number.

This is about half of the cabinet case parts stacked together by cabinet number.

Next comes Face frames. 3/4" Alder is ripped into oversize widths and then edge planed to remove all saw blade marks.  The face frame stock is then cut to size and stacked together by cabinet number.

The face frames are assembled with pocket screws.

Now we have a large stack of face frames.

Next comes the fun part, similar to the sheet rock stage of building a house when things start to take shape and you feel like progress is actually happening. 

This is the assembly stage of the upper corner cabinet.

A few days go by and my 7X14 trailer is plum full.

Now there is cabinets stacked everywhere.

This is the 24th cabinet and now it's time to start drilling shelf pin holes and final sanding.

Now the shitty part starts.  I've had a cold for the last few days and now it is time to dawn the breathing apparatus and fight with the snot dripping down my face.  The joys of sawdust and snot.

Future building steps:

Drilling for shelve pins.

Final Sanding.

Facing front edge of shelves

Building doors and drawer fronts

Building dovetail drawer boxes

Finishing Stages:

Step   1.  Seal the pores in the Alder with a coat of 1 lb shellac.

          2.  Stain

          3. Three or four coats of clear lacquer, sanding with 220grit between coats.

Drilling doors for hinges

Installing drawer slides 

Building toe kicks.

Demolition. (the fun part)

Sheetrock

Electrical

Plumbing

Installation of Cabinets.  (Wahooooo)

Stay tuned.