Mistakes Made and Corrected

 

The problem with designing things largely in my head is that it is unfortunately fallible and prone to making mistakes. Disregarding the back panels of any of this doors on this project, there are five boxes to make. Each box has four sides. I used up for of the sides when making the largest back box so when I went to start the middle two doors, I needed eight sides.

Two mistakes immediately became obvious. As you can see, I only had four boards for the middle doors and four boards for the outer doors. Half as many as I need. The second mistake is that I had cut the top and bottom boards at the same length as the top board of the first box I built. This made sense in my mind since both of those added up would equal the width of the first box but it makes it kind of hard to open said doors. 

The second mistake was easy to correct. I could merely cut each board directly in half. I would lose the width of the saw blade in material, in this case 1/8" which will result in a gap in the end but I think I can live with that gap or even fill it with a decorate piece of wood after the doors are mounted. That is a challenge for another day. But I was still short two boards each for the vertical sides of the two middle and the two outer doors. 

Rule #1 of Woodworking: Always buy more material than you think you will need, especially it you have to drive aways to get it and spend a considerable amount of effort to plane it down to size and cut it to the right size. Fortunately I followed this rule and had bought an extra board, mostly so that I could be a little more choosier in where I cut each board to avoid major defects. My extra board had several defects in it so I had set it aside. Now it would be enough material to make up two of the side pieces I was now short but unfortunately, it means setting up my planer and spending a couple hours planning off the rough sawn parts of the wood and then cutting the boards to the proper size on the tablesaw. Had I not bought that extra board, it would have cost me a full day.

That left me with the boards above. The stack on the right are the eight needed for the middle doors which I will start making next but I am two long boards short for the outer doors. 

Rule #2 of Woodworking: Save all scraps until your project is done. Fortunately I had done this too and above you can see all my bigger scraps. The boards on the left are all two short which is much harder to fix. The ones on the right are all too narrow but I have a lot of them. 

Modern wood glue is very strong when gluing two boards long grain to long grain or side by side. It isn't very strong gluing end grain to end grain or end to end. Physics are involved but I won't bore you with that. So I found four scrap boards that were longer than needed but now as wide as needed and decided to glue them together. There will be a joint line when I'm done which would bother me for a piece of fine furniture but for a shop cabinet meant to learn a new skill, I'm not particularly worried about it. It will be plenty strong enough.

With some glue and glamps, I now have the boards now looking a bit wider than necessary. When the glue is dried, I will do some cutting on my tablesaw and they will be the exact size I am looking for and I've saved myself about 2/3rds of a day of labor and more money.