Flat Door for Cabinet
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Hello all,
I’m working on a new liquor cabinet and am struggling a bit with the doors. I don’t want to use a raised panel and would prefer to have a nice smooth front. Given expansion, are there any suggestions or resources to achieve this or is a veneered plywood the best option? If necessary I could make a panel door but am hoping for a single solid piece.
I’ve attached a general picture (not to scale) of the general layout.
It is not uncommon to have doors made of solid wood without the doors being made with frame and panel construction. There are several ways to do it. I just now glanced over at my store bought TV stand which includes a kind of largely plywood cabinet with solid wood doors. What you probably cannot have without problems is solid doors inset into the cabinet they way Paul does it. They have to be external doors. However, on my cabinet, they are sort of hybrid: partly external and partly internal. They are set back into the cabinet frame, as you can see in the attached pictures. But as you can also see from the pictures, they are attached to a sort of internal frame which is built around the inside of the cabinet. They are external to that frame. This allows you to have solid panels that expand and contract as they want while still setting them back into the cabinet, if you want them set back that way. Hm. . . this might not made sense but the attached pictures should help. Oh, I have seen similar things done with solid wood doors on kitchen cabinets.
Mid century modern furniture with single panel doors like the piece you propose was made possible by lumber core veneered plywood developed in Scandinavia and brought to the USA in the 1950’s. It comprises a solid lumber core with a thick cross banded veneer, then another veneer over that, either done at the factory or applied by the craftsman. It needs to be edge banded to look finished. Picture below show the ply and how it is made. ( from a Tage Frid book on veneering)
It is widely available n 18 mm – 3/4” thickness just for doors on casework at commercial and higher end timber merchants catering to cabinetmakers.. here in Portland there are at least 4 merchants who sell it, typically in the $100-$200 range for a 4 x8 ‘ sheet with many species face veneer.
Inspect this stuff when you buy it. There is no fixing it if it is dinged up.A cheaper version uses an MDF core which is stable but a bit more fragile without edge banding typically used in cheaper installations. I have some in my shop I pulled out of a dental office when we upgraded the office. A picture below of the unbanded edge of a door in my shop, just stained on the edge. You’d be surprised how many 1950’s doors had that method. There is a reason we replace it 😉
For small doors you might get away with solid doors if you overlaid the doors on the case sides instead of in the case frame to allow for some movement. You see this on many Krenov cabinets. Even if it does move a little, it’s not as noticeable and can be fixed if it binds by just planing where the doors meet or adjusting the knife hinges, a fairly easy task with the right hinge.
Hej Mike,
We have a quite wide sideboard in solid oak, including the doors. The designers have addressed the issue (not a big problem in London) of dimensional changes by having overlaid doors that look very much as they were inset, and by having the grain running horizontally. The appearance of the doors looking inset is achieved by the bottom and top of the board protruding over the doors. To conceal the endgrain at the sides, two rounded-over boards are glued to the door edges, with the hinges at the back of these rounded pieces. (Unfortunately, I’m shielding in an isolated croft in Sweden, with strict orders from a lot of doctors [including her who must be obeyed] to stay put, as to why I can’t provide a picture).
If one does away with the somewhat elaborate rounded parts and had the grain running vertically, I imagine the trick with protruding bottom and top could give a rather convincing impression of the doors being inset.
Mr. Bill Hylton points in his book Illustrated Cabinet Making to warping in solid wood doors. Please allow me to attach a picture on the use of sliding dovetails to keep a door flat. The boards, which weren’t glued together, have shrunk thanks to modern heating and more comfortable temperatures.
Sven-Olof Jansson
London, UK; Boston, MAThank you all very much for the help. I’ll need to digest these a bit and figure out how to go forward, but this was wonderfully helpful
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