Kitchen Appliance Cabinet, Part 7

With this post, the base cabinet of the Kitchen Appliance Cabinet (KAC) will be completed, minus paint. We will cover drawer construction and adding the top to the base cabinet. And apologies in advance, this is a long post.

The Drawer

In my last post, I spoke of the anxiety of building inset doors. I view drawer construction as a low stress process. The only anxiety I foresee is the fitting of the drawer face (or applied drawer front) which will also be inset within the drawer opening and will need the same size perimeter gap as the doors. But, still a low stress operation.

For the drawer, I’ll be getting rid of a variety of cut-offs and extra wood left over from previous projects: red oak, white oak, a board which I think is hickory, and I bought some maple for the drawer face and some MDF for the drawer bottom. That means four different species of wood and MDF, something I would not do if this were a client project. But since the KAC is something only my wife and I will use, I like the idea of saving some money and getting rid of existing cut-offs where possible.

All of this is weighty stuff. To take some weight out of the drawer, I planed the drawer sides to 3/8″ thick and the drawer front and back to 1/2″. The drawer face (maple) is 3/4″ thick. This meant a lot of time feeding stock through my planer.

The drawer components after jointing and planning, not final size.

The exploded view is below. Getting tight fitting dadoes and grooves are important. Also getting good alignment between the sides and the drawer front so the dowels don’t cause anything to shift is equally important.

Drawer, exploded view.

I cut the grooves and dadoes in the side components and then began creating the dowel joinery. I use a drill guide to help keep the drill upright.

I use a drill guide to create holes for the dowel joinery.

When drilling for dowels, it is crazy important that the front edge of the drawer side aligns well with the drawer front. In the photo above, I triple check for good alignment and then clamp the Hell out of the boards. Note the gap stop has been removed from my work bench – a rare thing. The drill guide works really well; I need to use that more often.

The drawer back being added.

The drawer box completed, holes pre-drilled for screws which will attach the maple drawer face.

Close-up of dowel joinery. You can see one of two large holes which will allow access to the drawer knob screws.

I really like slender drawer sides. I once heard a Shop Talk Live podcast where Mike Pekovich and Matt Kenney were talking about drawer sides and they like 1/4″ sides! Really slender. While I have used 1x material for drawer sides (and everything in between), I like the look of 3/8″ thick material for drawer sides.

All goes well with drawer assembly and the drawer doesn’t rock at all when I sit it on my workbench. After fitting the drawer face to the drawer opening and adding a chamfer around the outside edge, I attached it to the drawer box and added knobs…

Drawer completed!

The Table Top

The top of the painted base cabinet will be stained and coated with polyurethane. I decided against painting the table top due to concerns that paint would not be tough enough to endure long-term use since the microwave and toaster oven to be housed in the upper cabinet are used for cooking. I could see a painted top being repeatedly cleaned from cooking spills and such, so I thought a polyurethane finish would be better. Which means I’ll need a good looking wood for the table top.

When I began looking for lumber, I had a preference for white oak since it is a tough wood, has a rustic quality and is a wood that is used elsewhere in my home. But after looking at two different lumber stores, it seems that white oak is scarce in my area. I found only a few 4/4 boards which after culling warped ones or ones which were not the right size, there was not much to pick from. I considered red oak from Lowes, had actually picked out three 8′ 1″ x 6″ boards, but their total cost would have been about $180!!! City Hardwoods had some nice ash boards which were much less than white oak. Plus, there were plenty of flat boards to choose from. So, all of this made my decision easy: ash for the table top.

I’ll use these ash boards for the table top and the base of the upper cabinet. About $100 worth of lumber.

After cutting the two smaller boards (above) into rough size, I ran them though the planer and jointer to yield the boards below.

The table top ready for glue up.

I only need a small amount of the board with the “6” on it. I rip it down and begin the glue-up.

The glue-up. I use my assembly workbench for this task.

Clean-up using a card scraper. Nice.

While these ash boards were mostly flat, there was a slight hump in one of them. I used my card scraper, my #4 smooth plane and a lot of sanding to get an acceptable surface. In the end, the top did not rock at all when placed on a flat surface.

THEN…

…the next day I began to layout for the clips which will attach the top to the case and saw that my flat table top HAD WARPED. How can this be??? Such a gigantic disappointment. A cup across the width of the top had developed – incredibly frustrating.

So, I had planned to end this post right about here – maybe with a nice photo of the top successfully secured to the base, but now there is more work to do. You might as well hang around to see how I fixed the top, and I’ll be quick about it.

Many years ago, I saw Norm Abram fix a warped board by ripping a groove down the length of the board, a groove about half the thickness of the board, maybe a little deeper. This was on the side of the board that didn’t show and it allowed the board to more easily bend under the pressure needed to pull it flat. I’m going to try this as well as add breadboard ends to the table top which will provide the pressure to keep it flat.

Forming a tongue for the breadboard end using a router, MDF fence and hand tools.

Cutting ash using a router with a straight cutting bit was a very slow process. A lot of work causing me to wonder if my router bit was dull.

Here I test fit a scrap piece of stock for the breadboard end. I then make the final cuts on the real material.

Breadboard ends secured with pegs.

To attach the breadboard ends to the table top, I used drawbored 1/4″ oak dowels. I have used breadboard ends several times in the past, but I can’t ever remember drawboring the pegs. I did that this time and it worked perfectly. I actually was pretty happy about this. The drawboring pulled up the joint super tight. The satisfaction from drawboring was almost worth the frustration of having the table top warp.

BTW, in this photo, you can see the grooves I cut in the underside of the top to help it flex and flatten easier. Once the cabinet is finished, no one will ever see them.

To attach the top, I place the top on my assembly workbench and position the cabinet on top of it.

I’m using these little clips to attach the top to the cabinet. The screw hole in the foreground (there are four) will get screws to secure the top to the base.

The base cabinet finished.

I think the breadboard ends add a little extra to this cabinet.

I discovered the warped top on March 17th. As I write this, it is May 4th. The warped top caused a delay of almost seven weeks, sort of. That time span also includes a weekend trip to Laurel, Mississippi, a repair I completed on some rotted wood in our front door casing. And the annual spring cleaning of our too big yard (which took the better part of three weekends). This delay is one reason I have become anxious about making mistakes with certain steps of woodworking.

I’ll say that I am pleased with the addition of the top’s drawbored, breadboard ends which went very well. Attaching the top to the cabinet was a little work, but was free of foul language. So, fixing the warped top has a happy ending. I’ll begin working on the cabinet top next.