31 fitting doors

In this video I want to give you some tips for fitting cabinet doors. With this

sort of design the doors fit within the face frames so the clearance between the

door and the face frame needs to be just right. And here's a procedure for making

that happen properly. Let's just look at this door for instance. Your first job is

to smoothen this edge here so the hinge side. Chances are it's going to be very

straight but it may be rough so you'll need to smooth this using some sort of

an edge sander setup whether it's the improvised one I showed you or maybe you

have a manufactured machine but you just want to get that smooth and consistent

with the face frame it fits against. Now one thing to remember this is a light

valence down here but in practice you're going to be fitting the door

before that light valence goes on and that makes things a lot easier because

you don't have to worry about the bottom of the door until later on. So step one

smoothen the hinge side. Now step two is to focus on the top of the door. What you

want here is that when the door is tight to this face frame style here and

the door is pushed up all the way it's also tight to the rail. So that's step

number two. You will be establishing a gap around the doors but just not yet. So

your third step is to shorten the door as needed so it's flush with the bottom

of the cabinet. That's step number three and as I said before you you can do this

with some sort of an edge sanding arrangement. You could plane these with a

hand plane. It's a little tricky there's a chance a good chance that there'll be

some splintering unless you're careful and skilled with a plane. Working with an

edge sander is much simpler. So now we've got a door that fits into the opening

and we would want to further reduce these three sides so that there's the

proper amount of gap. Now what is that gap? Well on the hinge side it's going to

be a thickness sufficient to accommodate the leaf of the hinge. In this case this

is rather thin. This is a no mortise hinge and the leaf is thin. No pocket is

necessary to install this hinge. You don't have to cut a pocket in either the

the face frame or the door. It just screws one to the other and you're ready

to use it. So aim for a gap of about a sixteenth of an inch or so. You may have

to fudge that a little bit but all the way around and when you've established

that don't worry about this side just yet. You repeat the same process for the

adjoining door. You'll notice this door there's two doors here in the same

opening. So you're going to want to do the same thing. You're going to want to

establish the smooth edge here. You want to get the door the correct length so

that it matches the bottom of the cabinet which is right there and the top

the same way. And now you bring them together. Now the door pair is going to

be wider than the opening it has to fit in. So you'll need to overlap one door on

top of the other and draw a line and then work to that line being very

careful to remove wood slowly because as you remove wood from one door on the

other that gap between the two is going to get larger. And if you make it too big

that's a problem because you can take wood away but you can't put wood back. So

that's the procedure for a double door arrangement like this. Now this situation

is a little bit different than what I just showed you because it's just one door in an opening. So you'll still want to start with the hinge side but you

won't be able to get the door flat into the opening because you've made it a

little bit too big. So you're going to have to put the knob side a little bit

out and smoothen this side. That's step number one. And then do the same thing

here with step number two for step number two. But as I said you can't get

the door in the opening because it's it's too wide. So you'll have to do it at

an angle. Now as a third step instead of working on the bottom work on the knob

side of the door. Mark it with a pencil line. Not necessarily the full amount you

need to remove but just mark a consistent pencil line down one side

Start to do some sanding and fitting. Put the door back. See how you're doing. Maybe

put a heavier pencil line on the bottom or the top depending on where you have

to remove more wood. And just sneak up to the the proper gap of sixteenth of an

inch or a little bit more all around. Now as a final step because remember the

light valance isn't here yet so the bottom of the cabinet is open. When you

can get the door in place then the fourth step the last step is just to

sand the bottom edge so that it's flush with the bottom of the cabinet. And

that's the process for for fitting inset cabinet doors like this