Basic cabinet building question

[Jerome Hanby]

Is there a good "trick" or technique to help the end result of building the carcass to turn out square. I'm currently building some shop cabinets using Tom Clark's book as a guide. When I can stop myself from making stupid mistakes, I'm making pretty good progress. Tom talks about gluing and stapling the back on as really squaring up the cabinet. In my case, I measured diagonals, then used a couple of K-body clamps hooked together to apply pressure along the "longer" diagonal to try and pull things square. I got it pretty close, but it's not perfect. Since this is the first of a bunch of cabinets, I'd love to get better with each one. Any recommendations?

Just in case anyone is curious, This cabinet is about 72" high, about 24" wide, and 23 1/2 " deep (not counting the back or "face frame"). It has 4 shelves, each a tray made from 1/2" plywood running on pair of 22" full extension 100 lb drawer slides, and two doors, one about 6" taller than the other. The two doors part was a change at the very last when I got nervous about a door that tall staying flat <g>. I picked the height trying to take advantage of the super tall ceilings in the shop. Hanging this cabinet on the wall far enough off the floor to clear my electrical conduit and leave enough room to slide Rubbermaid storage bins underneath made a six foot cabinet about the tallest I could handle without needing a ladder to reach the top shelf. My original thought was to go four feet wide, but I realised that this thing would way a ton and be very difficult to move around the shop and mount. It's pretty heavy at two feet wide!

I don't think I'm going to do any more sliding shelves. They work well but for all the trouble and material, I could have just made actual drawers.

Any help and advise will be much appreciated!

[ian maybury]

I'm not hugely experienced Jerome, but parts accuracy (square and equal dimensions) is where it all flows from in my opinion. Plus good registration so that there's no ambiguity about placing cross pieces is the other. After that squareness tends to sort itself out.

I've never done a run of cabinets involving larger quantities of parts, just one offs. I often cheat by tacking panels together with double sided tape and cutting out both sides in one go. That way they at least end up identical.

There's a book titled 'Cabinets and Built-Ins - a Practical Guide to Building Professional Quality Cabinetry' by Paul Levine and published by Rodale Press. First published in 1994. It's really hands on, very nicely written and illustrated, and works through the whole build and installation for several constructions. No fancy kit, and a one man operation.

On producing square cabinets - he shows exactly how to set up and sequence each cut so that almost no measuring is required. He uses tongue and groove corners to hold everything in registration - starting from full sheets of e.g. ply.

ian

[Todd Burch]

I never go for perfect. Perfect takes too long, and no one will ever pat you on the back for achieving perfectly square cabinets. I go for "good enough".

When measuring diagonals of a carcass, I don't like to allow more than 1/8" difference. If I'm 1/16" off, or better, I'm happy.

When applying a 1/4" back to a piece, and using the back to rack a piece into square, you can avoid the awkward diagonal clamping by stapling one edge of the back to the case, then moving to the opposite side of your case, and racking the case with your body (having somehow clamped the case to not move on your bench or wedged it to not move) and stapling the back to the case the rest of the way when you get it aligned how you want. If you are way out of square, you might want to rack the case into "more square" using some means other than a diagonal clamp, so as you don't smear your glue all over creation (and you can be judicious on the amount of glue you use too).

Note that a case laying on a non-flat surface will make you think it's out of square, but it might not be.

Todd

[Jerome Hanby]

Good advise. I surely did smear glue all over creation!

[michael veach]

I use assembly squares during the case construction and leave them in place until the glue dries. Then I put on the back. After applying glue to the back edges, I align the short side first and staple it down. Then I square a long side and staple it. After the back is secured, I put on the pre-assembled face frame. This works well for me.

[John Grossi]

Jerome, I build a face frame which is easy to get square. I use Sommerfeld's tounge and groove set, grooving the face frame, tounging the carcass. Glue it up and staple a back on. The cabinet will be square. Check out www.sommerfeldtools.com. He has a great video on cabinetmaking. John

[Steve Griffin]

I haven't glued a back on the last 1000 cabinets I've built, and not a single one has fallen off.

Save yourself a mess--don't glue on backs.