Raised Panel Door Pt. 1

12x12 door, 8 inch panel, cherry, unfinished

 
   On the weekend I had a very enjoyable and informative afternoon in a friend's workshop.  I went to see David to learn how to make raised panel doors on a router table.  I have made flat panel doors in the past by creating rails and then cutting a slot and capturing the sheet stock or mirror in the slot and usually I make my panels with mitred corners.

   This weekend I learned how to use rail and stile router bits to make cope and stick style doors.   If you look in our kitchen and bathrooms you see very sleek cabinet doors with no profile and a very small door knob, our taste learns toward Scandinavian style cabinetry.  But, I am always interested in learning something new.



    Another reason that I have not made raised panels in the past is the cost of the router bits.  I don’t like the style enough to go out and buy really good router bits and I knew that cheap bits will not give good results, especially on something like a raised panel.  My friend’s shop has all the tools, I mean all the tools ( he is in the trade, and does fabulous quality wood work)  and so it was with a  good set of bits and a very good router table, and an excellent teacher that I got to learn how to make my raised panel door.

    The first and most important thing in making a quality door is preparation.  I thought that I knew about material prep but David takes it to a new level and the results speak for themselves. The wood we used was cherry, care and attention was taken to choose boards that were clear of knots and were going to be easily trued up even though these doors were not going to be test pieces. That is a very nice way to work.



   Included in that preparation stage was careful measurement of the router bits to see exactly the width and depth of the slot it was going to cut as well as to carefully lay out the sizes of all the materials  to be prepared.  When I say carefully,  David  used a vernier gauge to check the thickness of the material coming off the joiner and out of the planer.   That degree of precision means that every door made is going to be the  same.  If today’s door rails are 7/8in think, exactly, then two months from now when a cabinet is added to the kitchen it is possible to match the doors, exactly. That insistence on exact,  very exact measurements is probably not visible to the naked eye, but...when you see work of that quality it touches something in the sub conscious mind.   No measurement was taken for granted and no machine trusted until checked.  The result at the end of the process was that everything fit, perfectly, not just close, but perfectly.  At least his did, me...well my first door will look  good with a little sanding.  His door was so good that it barely needed glue.

      Since there are three set ups in making a cope and stick (or rail and stile) raised panel door and I made my door second I cut the raised panel first.  The raised panel bit was in the JessEm router table already since he had done that last on his door.
      
      Having made all the calculations at the begining  of the project and determined all the measurements it really does not  matter which end of the process with which you begin as the pieces are descrete components to be assembled into a door at the end of the process.



   David showed me two ways to cut the raised panel.  One way is to align the bearing on the top of the bit with with fence and lower the bit until it is taking only a very small bite and make several passes, raising the bit until you reach the profile that you want and the material is thinned enough to fit in the slots  the frame.  The other way is to sit the bit to the height that you know you what and  pull your fence forward to allow you to make a shallow pass over the bit and in slow stages more the fence back until the panel is running on the bit’s bearing. Either way seems to work the same.  Both require patience and multiple passes removing small amounts of material each time. I will say that again, multiple passes removing small amounts of material each time.

raised panel bit

   Since the wood, the router table and the router bits were so good, as was the instruction the panel only needed light sanding to be complete.



   The virtue to doing this process on a router table is that it is fast and readily repeatable. If you are only making one door, the details can vary, if the door is one of many (lots of kitchens have 20 doors and drawers or more) they all need to look as much alike as possible.