Hello,

I’ve been doing basic “homeowner” woodworking for several years, and I’d like to try my hand at cabinet building, so please be patient with my inexperienced questions.

I’ve never built cabinet doors, but I want to learn how to do this. I have a couple of very elementary questions which are probably so basic to most of you that you probably don’t think twice about them, but I don’t know the answers, so I need to ask.

If I want to build a cabinet door using a router table setup with rail and stile construction and rail and stile bits, is the normal procedure to have the door panel “inserted” into grooves in the four sides, or is the normal procedure to have the panel sitting in a rabbet behind the four sides.

And if the answer is that you should “insert” the panel into grooves in the four sides, what do you cut those grooves with, a slot cutting bit?

Thanks,
Louis