How To Make Tongue And Groove Doors On The Table Saw - 171

one of the easiest and least expensive ways to completely change the look of kitchen cabinets or any cabinets for that matter is to just change the cabinet doors recently I made a complete set of kitchen cabinet doors for a relative and the method that I chose for the construction of the doors was a simple tongue and groove this was a very budget-friendly build so we used regular 1 by 6 pine for all of the rails and styles and used cheap pine quarter-inch plywood for all the panels now if you're not familiar with cabinet door terminology the styles are the vertical pieces and the rails are the horizontal pieces and the way a good way to remember that is if you're standing on a patio or a porch any type of handrail is horizontal so the rails are horizontal Melling the lumber is pretty straight forward I'm using 1 by 6 pine which is actually five and a half inches wide so that gives enough space to make two boards that are two-and-a-half inches wide and still allow enough room for the thickness of the saw blade to make my cuts so that means all of my rails and stiles are two and a half inches wide and I'm sizing them so that I have a one half of an inch overhang on all four sides of the actual opening that the door is going to cover probably one of the most commonly used tools to create cabinet door joinery out there is the router in a router table and one of the greatest benefits of using a router is that you can get all kinds of different looks simply by changing the router bit set now these sets aren't exactly cheap and also the groove that is on the inside for the panel to sit in is typically exactly one-quarter of an inch thick so if that's the case then these quarter-inch plywood panels that I'm using are going to rattle around in there because quarter-inch plywood is not exactly 1/4 of an inch it's a good idea to pre finish all your panels before assembly and also before you cut the grooves in all of your pieces once the pieces are milled to the appropriate size then you can start creating the groove and to create this groove using just a regular table saw blade in the table saw and positioning the fence so that it is very close to the center of the workpiece but offset by just a little bit towards one side it's a good idea to use a test piece first that way you don't screw up in you're good material but run the piece through and then flip it 180 degrees and run it through again and because the blade is offset and you're running it through from both directions the resulting groove will be exactly centered with the initial groove cut on all the pieces bump the fence over just a little bit so that the blade removes a little bit more material and repeat the process now it's a good idea again to use a test piece first that way you don't go too far with creating your groove you want the groove to fit the plywood nice and snug but not so tight that you have to force it on there you want it to be able to hold itself up against gravity with your test piece fitting the way that you want it to run all of your pieces through and just that easily with a regular table saw blade you've created a perfectly centered groove for your plywood panels making the tongue that will go into the groove is very easy to do as well and you can actually use your regular table saw blade to make this tongue it will just take a little bit longer to hog away all the material to speed things up a little bit I'm using a very inexpensive dado blade that will remove all the material that I need in one pass and to set this up the fence or they stop block whichever you're using needs to be the exact width from the outside of the blade as the depth of your groove or slightly less than start off with the blade a little bit lower than what you think it needs to be make one pass flip the board over and then make a second pass on the same end of the workpiece the resulting shape is the tongue now because we did this a little bit lower than what we think it needs to be it's probably not gonna fit on the first time so this will give you a little bit of leeway so you can bump the blade up slightly until you get that really nice snug fit again not too tight to where it's hard to fit the piece in there but tight enough to where it'll hold itself up against gravity with all the joinery cut I like to make a dry fit of all of the rails and stiles to make sure that I'm not gonna have any problems during glue up and once everything is dry assemble then you can measure the interior dimensions to figure out what size panel you need I like to make mine 1/8 of an inch less in both directions to glue together the door all you need is a little bit of glue on the tongue part of the joinery once the glued is inserted into the rail you have a nice long grain to long grain glue connection you don't need to glue the plywood panel in place because the plywood will expand and contract at a different rate than the rest of the door use a clamp on either side of the door to pull the joints down nice and tight and you can skew the clamps one way or another to pull the door into square if it's slightly out of square but really shouldn't have any problems at this point if you've made sure all of your cuts previously are square let the door sit in the clamps about a half of an hour then you can sand all the joints nice and smooth stain it if you want and then finish it the way you normally would any other project I hope this video is pretty much self explanatory to get you through the process of making a tongue-and-groove door but if you're interested I have a free downloadable PDF plan on my website that has a walkthrough on the general process of this as well as a diagram that will pretty much give you every single dimension that you need based upon any size cabinet that you're working with this particular job ended up being 21 different doors and four new drawers now I don't have any before-and-after pictures of the new kitchen but if you follow me on my facebook page I'll be sure to post those as soon as the job gets completed really hope this video was helpful to some of you out there and as always thanks for watching and have a great day you