Building Cabinets

What a big day. I get to start making cabinets for the inside of the camper. And in order to do that, I'm gonna bring some tools in here. There's a couple of ways you can play this. If the camper is sitting in your driveway and your, and you can work in your garage, you could just do it like that.

In my case, where I'm in a separate building, I'm lucky enough that I've got some portable tools and I can bring them here in order to do the work I need to do on the cabinets. Now we're gonna look at a variety of tools that are about to come in here. If you don't have access to those, I'm gonna show you some work arounds, so don't sweat it. But at this point, let's start setting up a shop in here. First thing I'm bringing in is a table saw and given access to one, This is gonna be a hugely convenient way to cut stuff to width, which is commonly called ripping.

The table saw is gonna get used a lot on face break parts, and then also probably on the plywood for the skins. A miter saw is an excellent tool for cross cutting our parts. And again, if you don't have access to some of the stuff, a table saw, a miter saw I'm showing here, I'm gonna show you some workarounds. With the miter saw, especially on a nice portable stand like this one, we'll be able to very efficiently and accurately cross cut, especially the face frame components, that's gonna make this really, really, really convenient. This one in particular is a sliding miter slot, not just a miter saw, and that gives it more capacity than something that's just strictly a miter saw.

It's gonna be great to have some kind of work bench right here on site. It's gonna help us when we assemble face frames, and just in general, I sure like having a place to set my stuff. This is called a Centipede and it works out really well, it collapses when you're not using it. And then this MDF top can go on when you are using it. The holes on there are gonna help us with hold downs and other stuff that we'll use along the way.

And again, just a work surface on site, that's gonna make it easier to do the work. Circular saw is gonna be very handy, And this will work hand in hand with some of the cutting workarounds I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna be putting a lot of my cabinets together using a staple gun. You don't have to have a staple gun. You can nail everything by hand.

You can use a brad nailer. Staple gun's gonna be convenient and fast. A pocket hole jig is great way to put face frames together and also some of the internal components for the cabinet. And our sawhorse is just rode into town here. Saw horses are gonna be great for are a couple of things.

One, you really don't want to store your material on the floor. It's best to have it up on something. So you can use the sawhorses for that. And then also as you're cutting plywood two by fours, whatever it is, just getting the stuff up at a good working height, it's gonna make it easier and safer. This particular set of sawhorses, which is made by Kreg, with the adjustable legs, it's really, really handy.

We can get them exactly the height we need for whatever operation we're doing. Because I'm gonna be using a staple gun, got to have an air compressor and air compressor doesn't have to be this big to drive a staple gun, could be quite a bit smaller. This just happens to be the one I have on hand. It's portable. So this'll be really convenient.

Like I said, the stapler is just gonna make things go faster and easier. I've got some cabinet work going inside the camper here. And actually it'd be more accurate to call it like skeleton work, 'cause that's kind of how camper cabinets are built. It's really, really important to give this some thought and pay attention as you're taking cabinets out of your camper to the way they were built, because that's gonna help you figure out how to put everything back together. I can't give you a comprehensive how to on camper cabinet making, 'cause it's gonna be idiosyncratic to your camper, your situation, your dimensions, your sizes.

But what I can do here is give you an overview of the work I'm doing inside this camper. And hopefully that'll help you with the work you're gonna do inside yours. Camper cabinets aren't built anything like conventional kitchen or shop or bathroom cabinets. Like I said earlier, they're way more of a skeleton onto which we put a skin and a face frame on the front in this case. One of the design considerations is gonna be, what are we doing for doors?

If you have the ability to make your own doors, you can make this cabinet any size you want and make the doors accordingly. If not, a good way to do this, the way I'm doing it is go to a home center and buy the doors. And you want to do that before you start laying out your cabinet. And the reason being these doors are gonna dictate the size of this unit. Pretty common approach with doors and cabinets is that the opening in the cabinet is one inch smaller than the door.

So the door overhangs a half inch on each side of that frame, each side of the opening. Once we know that, then we can figure out how big the cabinet has to be to match our doors. And that's a good way to go if you can't make your own doors. I went and bought these are maple. Maple is a wonderful paint grade wood.

Everything inside here's gonna get painted when it's done. And so that works great and of course, doors you buy are available in a lot of different species. You just got to do some shopping there. The way I'm gonna make this easier for you to follow along with how this went is we're gonna do this via computer simulation. So I've got a drawing and rather than try to sneak cameras into this tight space and show you the build of this stick by stick, let's go have a look at a computer and that drawing, that simulation, and you're gonna get a much better view of how this particular cabinet came together.

I've got a drawing of the camper here on my laptop, and I want to make sure you understand that it isn't imperative that you have a drawing of your camper in order to do this work. The only reason I did this is because to get the details of the cabinet, I think it's gonna be easier to do that here than in there. So this is what we've got. There's our camper. And what we're gonna have a look at is this cabinet right here.

So first off, I'm just gonna get rid of some stuff so we can see inside there better. And let me just unbuild this cabinet quickly and then we'll come back and we'll build it again. Here's where we're starting with. This is the cabinet that also the refrigerator and the furnace. And once I know the width of my cabinet, which is determined by the doors that I purchased, I want to get a cleat on the wall here.

Three quarter by three quarter inch cleat, goes from floor to ceiling. That piece can be screwed right into the wall and you can just use standard wood screws for that. That's gonna control the position of the skin, the piece of plywood that's gonna go out here on the outside of that cabinet. Just like there's a piece of plywood on the outside of that cabinet. Next thing I'm gonna do another three quarter by three quarter inch piece is gonna come here.

With that one, again, it's floor to ceiling, but look at how it's held back. This is the face frame we're gonna put on later. This cleat is behind that face frame. It gives us something to fasten to when we have the face frame built. This can get stapled to the existing cabinet, or you can keep using screws.

In my case, I used staples any place I was cleat to cabinet. Screws any place I was cleat to camper. Now on the outside corner here instead of a three-quarter by three-quarter inch piece, I did this with a one by two. So three quarter by one and a half. Now it's not really showing up here, but a couple of things all happen at the same time.

These pieces get put in. These are three quarter by three quarter inch pieces that get fastened to the ceiling and to the floor using wood screws. Those are what will then hold this vertical corner in place. Now I went with a little bit bigger piece there, a one by two instead of a three quarter by three quarter, because I wanted that to firm up this outside corner. I wanted to make sure this outside corner on the cabinet was rigid.

Now, when we have a cabinet here, it's gonna be in three separate sections, which is a larger on top, smaller in the middle, larger again on the bottom. And within each of those sections, we need a way to put shelves in there. So in conventional cabinet construction, you'd probably drill holes and use shelf pins. But of course, when you're bouncing down the road in a camper, that's not gonna work. So I did that with these one by twos.

The locations of these one by twos are gonna be case-by-case, camper by camper, cabinet by cabinet. Again, remembering there's a large cabinet at the top, a smaller one in the middle and another large one at the bottom. So I divided that into thirds on the top and the bottom. The center one, I divided in the center, in the middle. And that is how I located those cleats, fastened them to the cabinet, and then built into this frame.

The cleats out here are held to this vertical and to this vertical, with glue and pocket holes, we're gonna talk more about pocket holes when I actually build the face framing and I show you how that goes. Now, right now we're set for adjustable shelves. But remember this is a cabinet space. This is a cabinet space. This is a cabinet space.

There's no bottom to that cabinet until we do this. These cleats were installed all the way around. That's gonna hold the bottom of the upper cabinet. That's gonna hold the bottom of the center cabinet. And then of course, down here, the floor defines the bottom of the bottom cabinet.

So once those are in, once those cleats are in and they're gonna end up hidden behind the face frame, that's how they were located. Then we can put the cabinet bottoms in like that. That's half inch plywood. That'll go in to create these individual cabinet bottoms. At this point in your build, then we're ready for this outskirt outside skin.

That's made from quarter inch plywood. And this is a great place to use staples. Now I know I'm gonna be painting these cabinets, so I don't mind using staples. And then I'm gonna go back and do wood filler over the top of the holes left by the staples. That'll all get sanded and then painted.

So it'll be invisible when it's done. If your intention is to stain it, you're gonna have to take a little bit different approach so that you don't have big, the big marks left by staples. You could use brads instead, that would give you a much smaller hole to putty over. Once we've got the cabinet's side on, then we're ready for the face frame. The face frame overlays the front of the cabinet.

And then from this direction, it hides that plywood edge. So the face frame goes on such that it's overlaying this quarter-inch edge of the plywood, the face frame then going from the edge of the space frame or the edge of the cabinet all the way, sorry for the weird noises, all the way to this side of this cabinet. Like that. That gives you, like I said, a simulation, a good look at how this cabinet was built. In your case, you know, your mileage may vary.

You might have to change your approach a little bit based on your camper and how things go together in your particular unit. But this worked really well for this one. Now that you've seen that we're ready to actually do some real building. I want to show you some techniques for making the cabinet, making the face frame that you're gonna need for your unit. One of the things I've talked about a couple of times is if you don't have a table saw and a miter saw that you can still do this work like I'm doing on the cabinets with other tools that are gonna assist you.

So let's have a look at some of those, even if you do have a table saw, what I'm doing here, some people call this bucking sheets down. And what that is, bucking is just a way to say, we're rough cutting them down to a more manageable size. So even if you have a table saw, you might want to take advantage of stuff like this in order to cut the plywood down to smaller sizes so it's easier to handle. So we're looking at a variety of things. First off with my circ saw.

That circ saw has a blade in it that is a 60 tooth blade. That's a very fine tooth blade, and it's gonna give us good cut, cut quality in the plywood and that's important. What I'm gonna do here is use the straight edge and I'm aligning it with a pencil line on that end and then aligning it with a pencil line on this end. And what that's gonna do for me is it's gonna give me a nice straight edge for the saw to follow rather than me drawing a pencil line and trying to follow it by hand. When you set this up, I've got these two by twos on top of the saw horses under the plywood.

That's really, really important so that a client doesn't have the opportunity to collapse in once you've got the through cut complete. That's one approach for plywood, let me show you another one. Cutting plywood to size part deux. Devices like this that I've got in the circular saw are handy because we've got a fence. We've got the saw.

This really simulates what we would get with a rip fence on a table saw. And it's gonna let us cut parts to size. And maybe even more importantly, get repeatability out of this. Once I have the set, I'd can cut piece after piece after piece to the same size. So something like cutting the shelves for the cabinet, even ripping the face frame material for the cabinet could be done with this.

Here's how this one looks. The fence rides the edge of the plywood out here. And of course this makes the cut we're making parallel to that edge. And then again, two by twos on my sawhorses here, so that things don't collapse. And like I said, repeatability, if we had a bazillion of those to cut, then all we have to do is make a bazillion cuts and that's gonna keep everything accurately sized and parallel edges.

Mostly what we've talked about is kind of like replacing the table saw because we're looking at cutting up big sheets of plywood. In this case, we're looking more at replacing a miter saw and the way this one works is we can slide our material in. Establish the point where we need to make the cut. And then your circ saw will follow these guides. So that will let you cross cut and you can also put up fence in there that lets you cut angles.

So the point out of all of this sequence is that don't be intimidated by the idea that you don't have a table saw. You don't have a miter saw. Stuff like this is, takes up very little space, leaves no footprint here at all. And it can be very, very accurate when used with a good circular saw and a good blade, 60 tooth blade like we talked about so that you can build cabinets and other fixtures for your camper, like I'm doing for this one. Back inside the camper, after making lots and lots and lots of parts.

So the skeleton is the same as what you've already seen. What I've done now is I've cut the cabinet bottoms for the upper and middle unit. And then I've also got this outside skin cut. So I'm gonna be using a staple gun to put everything together and as a general rule, you want your fastener, I think I mentioned this before to be at least twice as long as what you're going through. So one inch staples for my half-inch shelves and I'm gonna stick with those one-inch staples out here on the skin.

They're a little bit overkill for the quarter-inch material, but overkill is better than, too much is better than too little. The other thing is picking up overkill. I'm gonna do is, I am gonna put just conventional yellow glue on all the components before I put them together. Now it's important I'm not putting glue where parts are fastened to the camper. So in the future, if somebody wants to take these out, they still can.

I'm only putting glue within the cabinet. And what that's gonna do is it's really gonna stiffen everything up, especially, you know, thinking about this thing, racking and fracking as you're going down the road. So it's gonna really give these structures a lot of rigidity. These decks for the center and upper cabinet could go in after the fact, but it's so much easier to work when everything is wide open, that we may as well do it now. And then staple gun is gonna be loud in here.

So. I already got other surfaces glued. So now we're ready for a panel And I've got pencil marks on the plywood that show me where the horizontal parts are inside here. Boom, boom, boom. Boy is that cool.

It is so neat to see this come together and get closed up. All right. Staples of my diet. I'm just gonna get this plywood pinned on. And of course, I mentioned earlier staple holes you're only gonna get under your door before the paint goes on.

Next is a face frame. Real easy way to see how frames go together is to again, take advantage of the computer here and the drawing and have a look at a face frame. I've got one on here. Here's my face frame. And what I'm gonna do to make this easier to see detail is I'm actually gonna remove it, quotation marks in the air from the front of the cabinet.

Whoop, out here to space. So some basic things about face frames and this information does pertain whether you're talking about a face frame in your camper, or if you're doing a cabinet for your kitchen or a vanity or whatever. In the world of face frames, these vertical components are always called styles. The horizontal components are always called rails. Very typically the rails, butt into the styles, the styles are continuous from top to bottom, just like they're shown here.

So when you do your calculations and you calculate your rail length, it'll be based on how wide is the cabinet, how wide are your styles? And that'll tell you how long your rails have to be. In my case, I have two inch wide styles going into this cabinet and that's a pretty good convention in the world of cabinet making, either one and a half inch wide or two inch wide rails and styles are pretty common. Now I'm gonna backtrack here on my rails. I changed the width of these from two inches to two and an eighth.

And the reason for that is when I calculated the sizes of my doors and then the sizes of my openings, the height of my doors and the height of the openings, it worked best, in order to get a half inch overlay, half inch overlap here and the door with a half inch overlap here on each rail, making these rails two and an eighth wide instead of two inches wide worked better. So again, that's gonna be a number that will be, it'll depend on are you buying your doors, making your doors, what size cabinets are you doing? There are gonna be variables there where you're gonna change that, in fact, you might end up changing the, width of your styles too, but again, a good convention to follow to start with is either one and a half or two inch wide rails and styles, but then adapt as needed in order to fill your space. The rails are commonly joined to the styles with pocket holes, and we're gonna see that happen when we make the face frame. So that's just an overview, a little bit of education on how this component, the face frame comes together in order to work with the cabinet.

It's really exciting because the face frame is the last step in building the cabinets. So it's gonna be really neat to build a face frame and get the front of that cabinet buttoned up. And then after that, we'll get the doors on. So you see how that goes. But for the face frame in my area here for this camper, I'm gonna be using a miter saw and the table saw to make those components.

Here we go. It's a great idea to connect to a Shop-vac or a dust collector with both the table saw and the miter saw to prevent a lot of dust from becoming airborne in your working space. I'm using a 40 tooth alternate top bevel blade on the table saw, that provides really good cut quality, which is important for the edges of our material. It's hard to beat a table saw for these kinds of repetitive cuts. The rip fence allows us to make piece after piece after piece all exactly the same width, In fact, this is the same way I produced all the parts for the skeleton of the cabinet that we built.

It's a good idea to set the fence to the size you want and then cut all the pieces you need while you're at that setting. So in my case, I've got two inch wide styles, two and an eighth inch wide rails. So I want to make sure all my styles get cut while I'm set at two, then all my rails get cut while I'm at two and an eighth. So think ahead then if you've got a lot of parts to cut, make sure you're getting them all consistently cut by cutting them all while the fence is at a given dimension. A good rule of thumb for using a push stick is if parts are three inches or less wide, you should be using a push stick to propel the pieces past the saw blade.

When you're ready to start cutting your parts to length, take the step of cutting one end first to guarantee that it's cut square, then measure from that end to the final length of the parts. That way, you know, you're gonna have two square ends when you're done. It just takes a second more and it's a good insurance policy to make sure that both ends are cut square and I'll do this to every part that I'm working with. Working with the longer styles, we want to make sure that both styles are exactly the same length, a really easy way to do that is to cut them together, cut them at the same time. So I've got them stacked up and I've got one end already flushed, the far left end was already, the two ends were flush with each other.

So I measure from that end, make my pencil mark. Now I can manipulate these pieces and get them under the saw, keeping that far end flush. If it's a little bit difficult for you, put a spring clamp or something on those two boards to hold them flush while you're making the cut. And that's gonna be a good guarantee good insurance policy, that those two styles are perfectly identical in line. I'm using a 60 tooth alternate top bevel blade on my miter saw, it's gonna give me really good cut quality, nice smooth end grain, and just great cuts, no chipping at all in this pine.

So on your rails measure from the end that you squared off earlier, mark out your length, and then again, cut them in a stack to make sure that they're all the same. If you have lots and lots of parts to cut to an identical length, you can set up a stop block on your miter saw, butt the parts against that stoplight and cut, butt against the block cut in order to make sure you're getting them all the same. It's really, really important that the four rails are all identical in length. The two styles are identical in length. When you've got the face frame parts cut to size, width and length, next thing to do is put them together and pocket all the joinery which has done with the pocket jig is a really common way to put face frames together.

The way it works is that our material's gonna go into this jig. And once it's in there, gonna drill a hole. And the hole is drilled at an angle and it's a specialized drill bit for this, it's got a little step at the bottom and that allows for the head of the screw and the body of the screw when we put everything together. A really good idea is to mark what's gonna be the back of your face frame pieces. And the reason for that is that when they go in the jig and we clamp them in place and drill, it's pretty easy to make a mental error and drill one set of holes and then rotate like this and drill another set of holes in the opposite face.

Don't ask me how I know. So as a preemptive strike here with a mark on the back, what I know that is that I'm always gonna have that mark facing me when I drill holes. The result then are these angled holes that will exit the end grain here, allowing us to drive screws into the adjacent piece. And this is the boring part of the work, get it? Here we go.

And we're done with this. And when you assemble, because that hole is drilled at an angle, if all you do is hold parts like this and try to drive screws it's not gonna go well, they're not gonna stay where you want them to be. They're gonna creep. They're gonna move all over the place. So we can go after this a couple of different ways.

We can clamp. That's what I'm gonna do in the first couple, just to squeeze the faces together, or we could clamp to a table like we have here. So we have a couple of things going on. And when I put my piece out here on the end, I'm gonna start by gluing the end grain. And glue is an important part of the joint.

Helps hold everything together. Then, align it with the end. And when I squeeze with this clamp, that's holding the faces into alignment. And holding them there while I drive the screws. And it's gonna be more of the same all the way down, setting the rails of the face frame to their alignment marks that control the openings of the doors.

Obviously, in this case, we're using the pocket holes on the face frame. Now turning the clock way back when I did the frame of the cabinet itself, the skeleton of the cabinet, I also use pocket holes there When I was installing the horizontals into the verticals in spots where I wouldn't be able to put a screw in. So all of those shelf supports that are inside the skeleton were put in also with pocket holes. So at this point, now it's more of the same. Now let me show you while I'm thinking of it.

The other way we can do this, that I mentioned is if we've got a bench, you can work on like this. Then instead of standing the piece on its edge and clamping, gonna just get my settings right here on the clamp. There we go. So another way to do this would be to bring the rail end here. Reach with the clamp.

Clamp the whole thing to the table. With a larger face frame, that's gonna be a better way to go, if you have a bench to work on like this. So in any case, let's assemble the face frame. Here's what we got. Face frame, going on the front of it cabinet making our high, middle, low compartments.

Next step, move inside, we'll get this baby installed. I really like how it looks. I tested the fit and then I put glue on the front of the cabinet parts, the skeleton, got the face frame attached to that. And now inch and a half staples staple the face frame on, and then we'll hang some doors. Pretty exciting hanging the doors here in the camper.

So here's how I do this. I've got marks on the face frame that show what the overlay of the door is. In this case, it's a half inch per side. Then I can position the door on those marks and put the screws on the hinge side of the door. So coming into this ahead of time, I've already fastened the hinges to the door itself.

Be sure that you pre-drill so that you don't crack any wood or break off a screw. So pre-drill, fasten the hinges, position the door, and then drive the screws here so that we get the door closing on those overlay marks. One of the things that you gotta to keep in mind is this is a camper, and you're gonna go down the road and it's gonna do this. So even though these are self-closing hinges, the self-closing is probably not gonna keep the door closed. So a latch is gonna grab that door and hold it in a closed position.

You're gonna want to do that on all of your doors. So same procedure for that last door on the bottom, and then overall, same procedure's gonna keep going for all the different cabinets in here. The approach might change a little bit depending on which cabinet you're building, but overall, you're gonna repeat this process for each of the boxes, each of the cabinets that you're gonna put into your camper. And I am excited to get this other door on. Now, the other thing I'll mention is when you're ready to paint, take everything off, including the hardware off the doors.

So this is basically a test fit. Make sure we know everything works, then it all comes back off, paint everything, put it back together. That way, If you do find you need to sand something, to tweak a little bit, you're doing that before it gets put onto the parts. All right, anyway, back where I was. Get that door on the bottom and then remember, I've got my adjustable shelf cleats inside here.

So I'll make those cleats, or those shows very much the same way I made the bottoms for the cabinets, get the adjustable shelves in there. And this unit except for paint is done and I can move on to some others I have in the camper.