Fundamentals of Cabinet Making Session 6: Make the Face Frame
George VondriskaDescription
How do you make a face frame that perfectly matches the dimensions of the case, without ever using a ruler? Learn George’s trick for transferring measurements, and all of your woodworking projects will become easier and more accurate. Also see how to glue your assembled face frame to the cabinet without having it slip and slide in the glue.
Before we do any joinery in the face frame, you do wanna make sure that everything worked out the way you thought it should work out. So put your parts on the cabinet. Check the length. What I'm doin' here is I'm squeezin' my two stiles against the rail, and then checkin' the overhang on each side to make sure that's gonna work out. Of course, at this point we'd have the opportunity to trim our rails a little shorter if we wanted to or replace 'em altogether if they were already too short, We don't wanna find that out later when we're putting the face frame on.
Once you know everything is both hunky and dory, then we're ready to talk about joinery. Pocket holes or screw pockets are such a common way to put face frames together, and very, very effective. Here's the deal with a screw pocket. What we're lookin' to do is drill a hole through the rails, we don't drill into the stiles, through the rails at about 15 degrees. And we're gonna do that with a specialized drill that's got a small diameter here that the shank of the screw will go through, a larger diameter for the head of the screw.
There's no way that we could do such a thing handheld. So instead we use what's called a screw pocket jig. It's got guides in it that will guide our drill bit at that 15 degree angle. Really, really important step here is to look at your pieces and determine front and back. Now on this one, cosmetically, it's a wash.
I'm gonna make that the back and I'm gonna make that the back. On this one, I'm pickin' it 'cause I have a little tighter grain on that face. And I like that, grain's a little bigger. The reason I'm makin' a big deal out of this, remember our whole concept about makin' mental errors when you're doin' your machining, same deal here. It's really, really easy, he says from experience, to do this and drill a pocket hole, and then do this and drill a pocket hole.
So if you flip in between drills, you're gonna have a rail that you can't use. You have to just rotate the piece end for end in order to make sure this comes out right. If you've marked the pieces, marking the back face, the X should always be up against the jig side. On our narrow rails, inch and a 1/2 rails, I'm only gonna drill one hole in the center. And if you miss center just a little bit, it's not that big a deal.
These are on the back, no one ever sees 'em. That gives us what we need in order to go to the next step and start joining our rails to our stiles. We know everything's workin' right. We've got our pocket holes drilled. Next thing to do is put everything together.
You do wanna make sure when you're using pocket holes, you put everything together with pocket hole screws. Specifically, we're gonna use inch and a 1/4 fine thread. The rule here is that in hardwoods, we use fine threads, and softwoods or man-made material, you'd use coarse threads. Now, when we do this, we need a way to get everything together and registered. Because of the angle of the hole, if we don't clamp this somehow, when the parts, when the screw comes in there, it's gonna cause these parts to climb against each other.
There are some task-specific clamps like this one that'll work great for this. I'm not quite ready to put the clamp on yet. We do wanna add glue to the joint. I'm bein' real careful here to make sure the long grain of my rail is flushed up to the end grain of my stile. That is ready to drive a screw.
It's amazing what a great job pocket holes do of drawin' parts together. It's really something. These have been used in the cabinetmaking industry for a long, long time. They're really a great way to assemble face frames. Some torque there.
Now, the next step here, this is where this style of clamp can get a little bit awkward. What we need to do is take this whole assembly and stand it up on our other rail. You can imagine that as a face frame gets bigger and bigger, we possibly have the problem where it gets tippy as we put it up vertical like this. So there are other styles of face frame assembly clamps that would allow you to clamp this down to a bench. Big face frames, I would definitely recommend that.
It's gonna be a whole lot easier to do. Small face frame like this, we can manage. I'm gonna glue both of my rails because once the screw is in on one side, it'd be really hard to lift up the other side and get any glue in there. All right, now, here's what just happened. When I started that screw, I lost my positioning just a little.
I think I don't have my clamp quite in the right spot. It's okay, we can fix that. That's better. Now, when I come back to this, I'm gonna put the screw in the next hole over 'cause I'm afraid I might have a little hole started there already that'll pull that rail out of position on me. There we go.
All right, now, we have a nicely assembled face frame that's ready to cover the face of our carcass. Before we can put the face frame on the front of our carcass, we have to take care of this overhang. Easiest way to do that is not with sanding, it's with trimming. This is a flush trim router bit. The way it works is that the ball bearing and the cutter are exactly the same diameter.
So when the ball bearing rides on this surface, the cutter will trim anything that's projecting past. Very, very versatile tool to have in your shop, well worth having. Now, what we wanna do is control our depth of cut so that we're projecting the bit just a little bit past that overhang that we created. That'd be perfect right there. You wanna clamp the cabinet.
The last thing we want is for this to get tippy while we're workin' on it. And we'll feed across here from left to right. I like to let the router come to a complete stop. It's still sittin' on the work. Now let's check our work.
What a nice job that does. And it's so much easier to flush trim that than to try to sand it and get 'em perfectly flat, very versatile tool. Now that that's gone, we can set up to get our face frame on the front. We are about ready to do this, which is gonna be really cool. Really starts to look like a cabinet.
However, one of the things I've run into is that if I put glue on the front of that plywood and then I set my face frame on top of it, as I'm clamping it, it has a tendency to move around in that glue. It kind of floats. Makes it really hard to accurately get the face frame in place. We're gonna use a nail to take care of that, not by nailing the face frame on, but by creating spurs that the face frame can stick to. So four penny brad, get these at Home Centers, tap it in just a little bit.
Then with a pair of side cutters, clip that so that I'm leavin' about a 16th of an inch of brad stickin' up, just a little bit. Take the remainder, go to the next corner. Clip it. Now, the benefit I get is that when I've got glue on there, I put the face frame on, the face frame is gonna sit up on those spurs, up on those nails. And it's gonna help me when I get to where I'm ready to position the cabinet.
And you'll see how that works, or position in the face frame, and you'll see how that works in just a second. Got a little bit of junk on my brush. There we go. Now, a good question at this point would be do we need anything else to reinforce this joint? Do we need to add biscuits or dowels?
And the answer is no, and I've glued lots, and lots, and lots of face frames on, always doin' it just like we're doin' here. Never had one fail. If you think about it, the composite surface area between the front of the cabinet and the back of the face frame is pretty significant. So remember a discussion we had a while ago, which was as long as the joinery is good, the joint when you're done is gonna be stronger than the wood that you're workin' with. So if we back things up a little bit and think about it, we used a really good quality blade when we cut this plywood.
So we have a nice smooth cut on this edge. Then we ran our face frame parts through the planer to get those faces nice and smooth, and nice and flat. And as a result, when these parts come together, they're gonna marry together very well. Great, great, great, glue seam. If we don't have those attributes leading up to this, you're gonna have a problem.
So you just wanna make sure that step-by-step, you're doin' stuff the right way. Right now, the face frame's sitting up on those nails and I can get it positioned. Positioning is gonna be end grain of the stile even with the bottom of the case side, right there. I'm gonna do the same thing on the other side. And then I'm splitting the difference on my overhang.
Remember, 12 1/2 cents per side. So I'm makin' sure that my overhang on each side is equal. At the same time I'm maintaining that evenicity between the end grain of the stile and the bottom of the case side, right there. Then when you're happy with that, this is the cool part of havin those little spurs in there, when you have it where you want it, watch right on this corner, I'm just gonna push. And what happened is the back of the face frame just seated into the tip of that nail and that's gonna hold it there while I start puttin' clamps on.
Don't skimp on clamps. I like to have a clamp about every six or seven inches. I'm gonna not use that one 'cause it doesn't have a pad on it. I wanna have a clamp about every six or seven inches. And if you skimp on 'em, if you don't use enough, what'll happen is that you'll have spots where the face frame is not drawn tightly to the case, even if you did everything right.
Now, next I'm gonna go to the top of the cabinet. And it's possible, plywood bein' plywood, that we're gonna have to manipulate this a little bit left and right, so that the overhang I have at the bottom is consistent all the way up, right there, seat it. Come over here, seat it. Check my overhang. On the side of the cabinet, again, plywood bein' plywood, just man-made materials bein' the way they are, we might have a little bit of a bow in the case side.
Because of the way that we machine the stiles, I wanna rely on that edge to be nice and straight 'cause it is. So I'm gonna pull the case side out, keepin' that overhang consistent all the way up. And I'm gonna take a trip around to the front once I get some more clamps. I want two for that side, and one for the top, one for the bottom. Gonna bring that up a little more.
There we go. Another spot where an extra pair of hands wouldn't hurt so that while you're positioning, somebody else could be tightening. Then my last critical edge will end up being the bottom of the cabinet and aligning that with your lower rail. As needed, remember, we made the rail so it would come out flush with the lower, with the bottom of the cabinet. So again, you might have to manipulate the plywood a little bit to make that happen, right there.
And there. Yes, the cabinet looks like a porcupine, but this is what we need in order to make sure we've got good closure between the back of the face frame and the front of the carcass. Next step, let that dry. And then we can keep movin' forward, workin' from the back to the front makin' our cabinets. Our next and final step on the face frame is making it beautiful.
We've got this overhang, 12 and a 1/2 cents, that we want to eliminate. And that's what we're gonna take care of next. Now, let's talk about what happened up here. To get to this point, remember I said earlier, we have to flush trim this part before we put the face frame on. And now, hopefully you can see why, if at this point this is still stickin' out and I go to flush trim this, the bearing on my bit, it's gonna run into the overhang on the face frame.
If I do the operation in the other sequence, if I try to do this first, the bearing on the bit is gonna ride over this high spot and then come back down to the top. So sequence of events, you really wanna eliminate this before we put the face frame on. Now, the only thing I've changed from the flush trim we did over here is I increased the depth of cut on my router, router's unplugged. So the ball bearing is down further and can ride on the case. Now let's talk about a couple of setup things.
I wanna make sure this goes well for you. First, the edge I'm routing should be right in front of me on the bench so that you don't have to reach around the cabinet in order to do a flush trim. If you look at the dynamic of this, if the router were to tip away from the cabinet, it's really no harm, no foul. If something happens that causes it to tip into the cabinet, this part of the bit is gonna overcut into the face frame and there's no good way to fix that. So we just don't want that to happen.
So I'm gonna have a couple of things going' here. One, that edge is right in front of me. Two, from seein' a lot of students make cabinets like this, I find that it's best for them to have a handle in board like this, rather than have the two handles parallel. This seems to help people keep the router nice and flat on the work. The other thing that you wanna just inspect before we get goin' is the relationship between the stiles and the rails.
If there's any little ridge there, run a random orbit sander over the face and get rid of that. But we don't wanna have happen is, we're routing along, and then we bump because there's a high spot where these two come together. As I do my routing, what you'll see me do is position myself, engage against the work, cut, come off the work. Then reposition my feet, cut again, come off the work, reposition. That way we're not trying to walk and route at the same time.
The last thing I want to see you do is try to come all the way around, reach over and route. This really lends itself to that router tipping into the cabinet. That's gonna be really bad. I've got my work on a router mat, but additionally I'm gonna clamp it. So eventually here I'll have to stop and move the clamp so that I can finish this side.
But we are ready to go and make that face frame look great. Oh, I love that part of makin' cabinets because look at that relationship now between the face frame and the case side. So think back on puttin' this whole thing together, we could have fussed, and fussed, and fussed over getting the rails exactly the right length, the stiles exactly the right length in order to produce flushness out here on the outside. Or make it easy, make the face frame just a tiny bit too big, do the flush trim and look at what we get there. Now, let's talk about order of operations 'cause that was a very intentional move.
What I did was this long side. Then I came across the top because this is an end grain cut. And it's possible that as we come across this end grain, we get just a little bit of chipping on this long grain. By doing this edge last, if there is a little bit of chipping there, we're gonna clean that up, we're gonna remove it. Really important to do it in that order.
And because of the way the cabinet is built, there's a cavity down here. Don't try to flush trim around the bottom. You get to this bottom corner, stop. Do not come around the corner 'cause there's nobody home here for the ball-bearing to ride on and you're gonna mess up your lower rail. Now, I wanna show you an alternative 'cause things don't always go the way we planned and I wanna help you fix any learning opportunities or mistakes that might be in your project.
So I'm gonna take this bit out of the router, put a different bit in and we'll talk about how you can fix some face frame to case mistakes that you might have. Sometimes the face frame doesn't marry up against the front of the case as well as you'd like it to. So we've talked about some of this stuff. If the cuts on the front of the carcass pieces aren't perfectly straight, if your blade quality wasn't great, if the back of the face frames aren't perfectly flat, all of these things can lead to tiny, tiny gaps between the back of the face frame and the front of the case. I'm gonna help you, not necessarily fix that, but mask it.
It's all about this cutter. Now, this bit's a little bit different than what we already used. It's still a flush trim. I've got a ball bearing the same diameter as the cutter, but it's also got this V. And this is specifically a face frame flush trim.
The difference is that this V is gonna go right into the seam between the face frame and the case. And it's gonna create a detail there that's gonna help mask any irregularities you might have. So first thing, setting the depth of cut on this cutter is much more critical, router's unplugged. We wanna make sure that the V is going right into the seam between the face frame and the plywood. You don't have to do a standard flush trim first.
You can do all of your flush trim, like I just did, with this bit, leaving behind the V detail. I'm just gonna do one side so you can see what this would look like in case you wanna add this as a detail or cover mistakes. And here's what that provides for us. We've got this line right behind the face frame. And what'll happen is that when we, certainly if we stain this project, stain is gonna go in there.
It's gonna darken that even more than the surrounding areas and create a shadow line. Do a great job of masking any irregularities we have between the face frame and the case. So this is a great thing to know about for really two reasons. One is I have this issue where they didn't glue up as well as I wanted 'em to and I wanna hide that. Or now that you've seen what this looks like, maybe you just like how that looks and you wanna add this as a decorative detail to your cabinets.
We've got the router bit sourced on the PDF that accompanies the class. It's a great thing to know about, have in your back pocket, so that you can add this to your cabinets if you want to.
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