Making Shaker Style Kitchen Cabinet Doors
This is a great Youtube video demonstrating how to fabricate a cupboard door. Making a shaker style is the easiest wood kitchen cabinet door to build. You will need a few power tools in order to finish the job nicely.
Your door frames will be fabricated out of three quarters inch thick materials. You will need to set up a router table with a dado cutting bit in it. The dado groove will go in the center of the ¾” long edge of your stiles and rails. The cutting bit is one quarters of an inch thick. You should groove all of the long stock pieces prior to cutting them off with a radial arm or chop saw.
Your center-flat panel will be just shy of one quarters thick. This will allow it to slide into the grooves nicely when assembling the parts together.
Once you have all of the kitchen cabinet door rails and stiles cut to length and routed, it’s necessary to start cutting the rabbit joints on both ends of the rail pieces. This is done with a dado blade set on the table saw.
The final stage of the process of building the doors is going to be the assembly of the parts. All of the frame pieces and the center shaker door panel should be thoroughly sanded prior to assembling them together.
When assembling all of the parts for a kitchen cabinet door, measure diagonally from outside-corner to outside-corner to ensure that the dimensions are identical. Once the door is perfectly square, you can place one staple in each corner to hold everything in place while the glue is drying.
The large-flat center panel should always be free-floating. Never glue it to the frame pieces. The dado joints of the frames are the only parts of the shaker doors that get glued with yellow carpenters glue.