Hand planing for full overlay doors?

[Dylan Borcoli]

When kitchen cabinet full overlay doors (being ordered from a separate company) are supposed to have typical gaps, but nice straight lines, do you recommend ordering the doors slightly larger and hand-planing them down? Or would you just order them to the measurement? If it's better to order larger, how much extra would you add? I can imagine that putting too much extra margin would result in a lot of hand planing. I read about this technique for flush inset doors but I am not sure if it is done this way for full overlay. Is there a certain gap where the hand planing technique (vs. just measuring) is done? For example, if the gap is to be 1/16 then order doors with slightly larger margins and hand plane, but not if the gap is 1/4 etc.

[J.R. Rutter]

For full overlay, there is generally enough room to use the hinge adjustments to even out the gaps. Find out what size tolerance they build doors to. If every door came in 1/16" undersize, that would be an issue - so you may want to get a guarantee on minimum size allowance. Most of my customers are full overlay and we guarantee +/- 1/32"