I had two Scamp projects to work on today. One was to finish cutting and gluing the wood parts of our new bathroom door together. It is coming along very well and should be ready for wood stain tomorrow.

Click to view attachment Back -- Unstained with oak wood stripe down middle & standoffs for towel rail at top and middle, but without the punched panels.

Click to view attachmentFront -- Unstained with punched metal panels and mirror

The other project was to make five upper kitchen cabinet doors. They're all identical, 11" wide by 9-1/2" tall doors, so I decided to mass produce them. You know: cut all the top pieces at the same time, the bottom pieces, etc., glue the six pieces each that make the five back halves of the door, then the six that make the front halves. My next step was to glue the ten half-doors together to make five doors . . . they're looking really sharp . . . except it is just now I realize that all the doors I've made for the scamp so far have the wood running a different direction. So they're going to look really sharp, but won't match the rest of the woodwork.

Click to view attachment What my doors & drawer fronts are supposed to look like

Click to view attachment How these doors came out

Grrrrr! I'll re-make them correctly next weekend, but these are so close I may as well finish gluing them together so someone else can use them. They'd make excellent picture frames that exactly replace the Scamp upper kitchen cabinet doors . . .

--Peter

That's the trouble with doing beautiful work at such a high level, Peter; the doors you've produced are a disappointment because the wood grain is the incorrect orientation. If I had made them, I'd marvel that they fit without taking the belt-sander to them 8-).
Cam

ahhhh measure twice, cut once? I agree with Cam, tho in my case I'd probably have to be satisfied with gaps ...

Someone is going to have nice picture frames and a story to go along with 'em.

That last picture is just pattern testing, right?
They're going to look great when you're finished and have them installed.

Peter, just a thought, but on top you have a piece of wood going all the way to both sides and on bottom is wood between side pieces. When the side pieces expand and contract, they may split if they are glued to the top piece, which will be stable.

Otherwise, they are going to look great.

Peter, .. I may be dense.. are you trying to point out the skinny bits are supposed to be the top and bottoms, and the fat bits are the sides, but you put them together the exact opposite?

Yup, that's it. It might sound like overkill, but it'd drive me batty every time I looked at them if I didn't redo them to match. I've only got about 1-1/2 hours of shop time invested in them thus far, so it's not a huge loss.

What confuses -- or bemuses -- me is the transformation in attitude. I used to tell Lynne not to stress on decorating the trailer too much because -- and this is exactly how I put it -- its only a camper trailer. A tent on wheels. A warm, dry place to eat, catch a few ZZZZ, and hide when it's rainy outside and we don't want to go hiking or adventuring. The only thing I planned on doing was making the space more usable. Not glitzy or chic (though certainly not ugly, either) just functional and easy to look at.

I bought several sheets of pre-finished hardwood plywood from the factory-seconds shop because it was strong, lightweight, dirt-cheap and wouldn't require a lot of effort to finish it, then I got to work.

I added a laundry hamper to the loft design because it was just so damn useful to have one. Ditto the drawers and loft cabinets.

I decided on a drawer and cabinet door design that used punched aluminum sheets for much of the door front because it is very light, strong, and would to allow air to circulate and fight back against mold growing in the trailer while in storage here in the Pacific NorthWet.

So now, when I see a cool, curvy mirror at IKEA I think, "Hey we've been looking for a mirror in the Scamp . . ." I bring it home, attach it to the bathroom door, and the craftsman and artist in me thinks, "Hey, I could design a cool door around that . . ."

Somewhere along the way, our "tent on wheels" turned into a rolling pleasure palace. But, what the heck, I'm having fun!

The doors are a layered, with a second set of timber constructed upside-down from the front layer, then wood-glued together. It doesn't totally protect me from cracking at the joints, but it's a good start.

--Peter

Duohh! Ok, that's worse than wrong grain orientation; as you can tell, I wouldn't have noticed until I had them on. I will put on my "new" glasses prior to replying next time.

OK, that's all right -- That's one of the reasons they came up with plywood; grains running in both directions make for more stable wood.

I think what you are seeing in your attitude is the difference between (perhaps male trait) indifference to your surroundings and pride of workmanship. If someone else built it, eventually you would become accustomed to it.

Ah Peter, just paint them white... no one will notice the grain or thickness of the wood.... just the WHITE!

Glad to have been of help

Oh no Donna, that is what the next owner does with them.....

That actually wouldn't bother me . . . I'd have made them differently if that was their original destiny, but the amount of work to this point would have been almost the same.

--P

Hi: Peter... When I'm done reno-ing our house bathroom...MEGA$$$$ I'll send you the measurements of all our cabinet doors from the Boler and you can make me a set o doors as there won't be any $$$$ left in the kitty. LoL p.s. the mactac is peeling and the grains aren't all going the same way either!!!
Alf S. North shore of Lake Erie

Why not make all the frame pieces the same? Make all your styles [sides] full length and all your rails [cross pieces] to fit between. You could cut all your woodwork the same at one time and then cut the multiple lengths that you need. Make it about 2 1/4" to 2 1/2" and all should look good. A lot of pre made doors are made with a wide bottom rail so that you can cut to fit after you take it home.

I could do that, but I've already made several doors and drawers already, and I want them all to match.

So here's what the "bad doors" look like (unsanded & unfinished):

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And the "good doors" look like this (also unsanded & unfinished):

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I'll get the whole lot of them (good and bad) sanded up, then stain and finish the "good" ones and install their center panels this weekend. Hopefully I'll also have time to do the sink-side lower cabinet doors before Northern Oregon Gathering (NOG) in a week and a half, too.

--Peter

And here's how the new doors -- second edition -- look in the kitchen.

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--Peter

Got the last of the doors made and installed in the kitchen. Here's how the final product looks!

Click to view attachmentClick to view attachment

The pots-n-pans cabinet has an organizer inside the door. The white enameled Masonite not only provides a spot where the utensil hangers can go, they also protect the aluminum mesh door fronts from getting dinged by shifting pots & pans.

Click to view attachment

I made & mounted the knife block so that the blades point toward the hinges and so that if the knives bounce up and down while the trailer is in motion the handles bump against the fiberglass opening in the cabinet.

A place for everything, and everything in its place!

Peter, it looks terrific and the utility/storage is an inspiration.

May I ask, what catches do you use on the doors? Are they strong enough to stay closed in travel?

I thought I might need to get those tension catches or whatever they are called, when I get to the doors on my "work in progress" but I prefer the simpler knobs like you have.

I'm experimenting with something new for my catches. Instead of using mechanical catches of any type I'm using high-power neodynium magnets. I gave these a test run on my upper cabinets, and have been very pleased, so now I'm installing them everywhere.

The concept is simple. I use ring magnets with tapered counter-sink holes in them from K&M Magnets (ordered in a 10 pair-set; it was cheaper to get 20 magnets that way) on the door side matched to a simple nut, screw and trim piece on the fiberglass cabinet. Seems to hold really well.

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

These little "N-42" magnets require 13 pounds (6kg) of pull to separate them from an iron surface, and that seems to be enough for most of my doors. I'm using a pair of them (top and bottom) on my pots-n-pans cabinet, which has heavier stuff inside, but may discover I have to move to the next stronger magnets with a pulling force (22lbs, 10kg). If worst comes to worst, I can pair the magnets up, put a pair on the cabinet as well as on the door, which will again double the amount of pull required to open the door.

Two words of warning about these stronger magnets: First, the stronger the magnets are, the harder it is to separate them. I had a pair of these 1" diameter by 1/8" thick magnets that generate 80-lbs of force each. Separate them by even 1/8" and they're much easier to get apart, but when a pair come into direct contact it takes about 160lbs of force to pull them apart; thats about what a man who trains in the weights room once or twice a week does on bench press. The point is you can get magnets that are so strong it becomes a chore to open a door. I'd stick with the magnets I listed above and not go any stronger.

My second warning is the metal in these magnets is kind of brittle, and the higher the "N" number (a measure of the magnet's strength per gram), the more brittle the metal alloy becomes. How brittle? That pair of "N-50" 80lb magnets I mentioned? I was playing with them, making one magnet levitate over the other when one of the magnets flipped over and the two of them came together with such force that they both shattered explosively, sending glass-sharp shards of magnet around the room. At least the mess was easy to clean up: I just waved one of the larger shards around over the table and floor and all the little magnet bits jumped right to it, but even after cleaning up the room the mess wasn't quite dealt with. When my son collected the garbage from all the rooms of the house on garbage night and took it out to the can in the garage, the cluster of magnet shards tore a hole through the bottom of the plastic garbage bag as my son passed by Lynne's car. I had to remove the larger pieces from the hood using a pair of pliers. (Once the larger bits were collected in one spot, the smaller bits happily popped off the hood to join the mother ship.)

The smaller "N-42" magnets I'm advocating for door catches aren't so strong or so brittle that they'll shatter.

Peter,
Is that a spice rack on the wall next to your upper cabinet doors? Did you make that, too?

Yes it is . . .

Click to view attachment

Here's the Topic I wrote about it and the spin-off Tall Tale.

Thanks for the info on the magnets.

That's a great story too!

If there was a "Stories" thread, that would be a great posting in it's own right!

I made this "drawer" front that's under the sink to be the front for a "tilt out" drawer-like-thingie that I'd add sometime down the road when I install counter tops and a new sink, but the more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea. So instead of fronting a tilt-out-drawer, it's one of the few non-functional purely trim pieces I've put in.

Click to view attachment

Peter,
Thanks for the info and pix on the spice rack. I think I'm going to have to make one for my husband, the gourmet cook at our place!

I was looking at it thinking about what a great spot to store those marshmallow, weenie skewers thingies that are always in the way. I'll have to look at mine and see if it can be done.

BTW I do like the 2nd version of your doors, the two wood widths make squares out of rectangle, esthetically pleasing.