Making Raised Panel Doors The Easy Way

if you've ever wanted to build a raised panel door for your furniture or for a kitchen cabinet job that you're doing or any kind of accent piece that you're making today on woodworking with wes we're going to show you how and how to do it with just a simple router table and some bits that we bought from amazon let's get started to get started on our raised panel door today let's talk a little bit about what we're doing first and what we're using for wood the wood we're going to be using is red oak we're going to be using a bead cut style and rail this is the little bead that goes on there this is our rail stock fits into our style stock like that to make our corners this is our panel piece right here and a test piece we always make a test piece do our tests first when we run our edges so that we make sure correct this is our test piece for our styles and rails this is our rail stock this is our style stock now we're only going to make a three inch wide style and rail but when i make my pieces to go through the shape through my router table i always make them double wide for safety and to be able to hang on to them good and to get a better cleaner cut we'll go through and show you how we do all that um now the door that we're making is 14 and a half by 26. our styles will be the full 26 high our rail stock however goes in between and we cut it nine and a quarter the nine and a quarter distance is determined by the fact that we have three inch style and rail or three inch styles and our rail has a tongue on it that we have to accommodate for the measurement there so we subtract six inches and add three quarters of an inch because our tongues are three-eighths so you got a 3 8 on both sides just remember that when you make your styles and rails you've got to allow for the tongue on your measurement that'll go together just like that here's our stock rail stock first we always do our ends first then we'll change our router bit over and do our grooves on the ends of our on the sides of our stiles and on the ends of our rails and then we're ready to cut our panel and glue together but let's just go ahead and go through i'm going to show you a couple of things along the way but mostly we're just going to watch this go through the router table as we cut our pieces this is our test rail piece we have our router bits all set up we've set our fence we have our depth and our height all set so that we can get started like i say we're going to run our test piece if our test piece works right and we are pretty sure we got it set right where we want to i've tried it already we're going to go ahead and run a test piece so you can see how i run my test piece and then we'll run the ends of our rails let's get started by putting on our hearing protection safety glasses and go [Music] in setting up our groove uh cutter we wanted to make sure that our groove lined up with our tongue and so we used our test piece and we set our router bits so that the groove took out right exactly even with the tongue now when we get ready to put our door together by having our tongue and our groove perfectly lined up that makes our door go together nice and flat makes it easier to sand out when we're all done so let's go ahead we've got it set exactly where we want it right now let's go ahead and run all our grooves on the ends of our rail pieces top and bottom of our rail and down the sides of our stiles [Music] we're all done cutting our groove pieces i want to show one little thing that we that i like to do often times as we run our uh pieces we get tiny little chips let's see if i can turn this in a way that you can see it real here but we get tiny little chips along the edge of the bead that goes against our panel those little chips really show up especially when you go to paint or stain and lacquer what we do to solve that problem is i'm going to take this over to the jointer i'm going to joint a 30 second of an inch off of the face of my groove and re-run it through the groove now because i've already done the majority of the cutting that little thirty second of an inch just helps clean that up when i run it through the second time makes for a good clean crisp edge and a much better looking door when we're all done [Music] i wanted to point out just exactly what we accomplished if you look at the end here of my board you'll see the little flat spot that we just jointed on there that 32nd of an inch so our bead isn't perfectly round it's just flat on that one edge we turn it around here to the edge that i've run and we've now put a full bead smooth on there but look what a nice edge that gives us on the edge of our bead that is just going to make our door so much nicer when it goes together it's just a little trick to make your edge turn out nicer your router bit will doesn't take off very much when you redo it the second time you're just taking a 30 second off and it just cleans up that edge so nice and it just makes a more professional looking door let's finish that up get ready to put our panels together one of the other advantages to making our style and rail stock double wide is after we complete all our router cuts all the way around we bring it back over to the table saw and cut it into three inch wide style and rail pieces and they're full size nice and clean the routing is all done and it's nice and consistent when you put the door together so let's go ahead and do our styling rail rip [Music] so just like that one of the advantage or one of the things that i forgot to mention is when i cut my piece double wide i cut it six and a half so that i always have plenty of material there to cut my three inch pieces out if i damaged an edge when i was running it through the router table or something like that i haven't ruined my piece of wood i can just take that little edge and trim it off and start over but by making it six and a half instead of just six and 1 8 for the saw blade width i can go ahead and do anything i need to and then when i'm all done i still have my full size styles and rails again keeping with the consistency that makes our door better the last video that we did we built a router table now you see the reason we built the router table is we had to have it in order to do this raised panel door for our raised panel bit now we've got our router bit set up in here right now and i have it turned wait our lowered way down the reason i did is because i wanted to make sure that my bearing was level with my fence on both sides because we're going to be pushing the panel through here and we want the panel to ride on the bearing and right on this fence now our router is uh not big enough to take a full cut off of the edge of our panel so what we're going to do is we're going to start out low and we're going to raise our bit until and we made a test piece so that we could do this we're going to raise our bit until it cuts sorry excuse me we're going to raise our bit until it cuts to the point where the leftover on the edge of our panel stock fits in to our groove and so as watch as we go through and we'll be testing it every time we send it through as it gets a little closer to make sure that what we end up with is the edge of our panel stock equal to the width of our groove which is a quarter of an inch by the way so just watch as we go through we'll be making several passes we'll make a pass on our sample piece and then cut our panel all four sides to correspond then we'll raise the bit cut our sample piece test it cut our bit so it's a process in order to cut the panels if i was doing an entire set of doors once i got everything going like this i would do this on every panel all the way through i would do my test piece first and then i would run all my panels and then i would do my test piece and run all my panels this is the most important part of your raised panel panel door in order to get the panel to look really good you've got to just make sure that it cuts correctly let's get set up and going we'll clamp our router table to our bench first so that it's good and tight if you have not seen our rather router table video go back and watch it so that you can see how to do this one of the other things i want to mention is all of these bits that i'm using the style and rail bit and the panel bit even the router i purchased all of these things from amazon and it's relatively inexpensive for a matter of a couple of hundred dollars two or three hundred dollars you can set up and build a raised panel door build your router table by your bits and your router and you can do just like i'm doing with a raised panel door but let's get started working our way up now we're gonna set our panel cutter just a little bit shallow and we'll show you as we go through each time to show you our progress and how we test it i'm gonna put on my little grippy gloves while i do my panels so that i can be sure to hang on to my panel good i don't want it flying out of my hands got to be extra safe this is a big bit we're going to really be conscious of where our fingers are and what we're doing so that we are always safe when we're using power tools get our hearing protection on and our glasses off we go oh gotta plug it in first [Music] so [Music] getting ready to glue our door knit together now we have our panel all sanded and we sanded the back side of our panel and the route the front side of the panel right here will be sanded off as we sand the whole door out but the route has to be sanded before we assemble and the back has to be sanded before we assemble because we won't be able to get in there but the last thing that we need to do is whenever you make a solid wood door you have expansion and contraction in your panel and you have to allow for that and so we have what we call space balls now spaceballs create a space between the panel and the bottom of the groove in your styles and rails and allow that door panel to expand and contract you don't glue the panel in you just glue the stiles and rails together on the corners you'll see that as we go through here but your panel floats and these spaceballs keep it centered and allow for expansion and contraction i always put a couple in each end like this and then a couple in the grooves of the styles and that keeps our panel centered as we glue it together and then i just take my glue bottle i have marked where i want my glue to stop on my styles and rails and i just take my glue bottle make sure i get plenty of glue but we don't want so much we don't want it to get into where the panel is because like i say we don't want our panel to be glued in we want it to float and have that expansion and contraction capability as an expansion and contraction is caused by heat humidity you know it's just a climate thing so let's go ahead and put our rail stock in there we had a little space ball fall out there and then we put our panel in we put our other rail piece in our style piece goes on top bring our clamps in here and we're going to clamp our door together push that in and we'll crank that down good and tight start on the other end bring our rails in flush like that we got plenty of glue in so we got a good squeeze out i like to pound my door down flat against against my clamps so that that holds the door square and there's our door clamped up now we'll wait for that to dry we'll take that out of clamps and sand it up and get it ready for paint shop we've let our door dry long enough now that we can take it out of the clamps getting ready to run it through the wide belt sander so let's take it out and get ready to go there's our door and what we're going to do is we're going to go over we have a wide belt sander and if you have one that'd be great if you don't have one you can just take a orbital sander and sand this down one thing you'll want to do if you're just doing this by hand with this with a sander is make sure that the level of your style and rail and the level of your panel is the same so that you can sand it all nice and smooth taking it to the wide belt sander that brings everything down level and so it works really well that well if you are doing a batch of doors a whole kitchen's worth or a big piece of furniture if you don't have a wide belt sander and you're doing a bunch of doors it's worth the money to go to a shop that it will rent you a time on a on a wide belt sander and have your door sanded it just makes a better door keep that in mind if you're doing a production of any kind i do that did it for years i would take my doors for kitchens and have them wide built sanded for me at a custom shop just really really makes a better door especially when you're doing multiples but let's go ahead and run this through the wide belt sander bring it back put an edge on it and sand it [Music] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] do [Music] well there we are the perfect raised panel door this is something that you can do with the materials that we've showed you and the router bits that we showed you and the router table that we built special for our raised panel this is a great project that you could do and you could have a door just this professional with your own router bits and your own router tables we're going to make another video and show you how we put a finish on this and we'll see you then on woodworking with west [Music] you

Channel: Woodworking With Wes

Views: 158,961

Keywords: raised panel door, table saw, woodworking lesson, cabinet doors, router bits, raised panel router bit, rail and stile, cabinet making, making cabinet doors, raised panels, woodworking lessons, cabinet doors 101, router bits and their cuts, router bits for beginners, stile and rail door construction, stile and rail door, stile and rail router bits, stile and rail cabinets, stile and rail cabinet doors, rounter bits, woodworking, woodworking for mere mortals

Id: 3qp4tmefIac

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021