The Center For Panel Design

The center panel for the cabinets is done! I’m very happy with the way it came out, although the contrast in between the rails and stiles is a bit more than I would have liked. I needed wider wood for the stiles so I wasn’t able to use wood that I cut from the 2 big slabs of curly redwood.



This is for the inset section on the lower cabinets of the big dining room cabinets I’m making. The tile panel at the bottom is the same height as the doors. I had a few pieces of burl left over from making the drawer fronts so I decided to added a small panel at the top that will mimic the drawers on either side.

As I mentioned a few weeks back I need to make the cabinets a few inches wider so they will fill the space. However, I’m limited by the width of the wood I’m using because all of the wood for the face frames came out of the two big slabs I cut up. By making the center panel wider, I can now play with the over all width by exposing more of the center panel when I go to assemble everything.

Originally I was looking at a 10-inch wide center panel. With 10-inches I would have come up 3 or 4-inches short in the over-all width. With the wider wood, and the molding around the tile and burl panel, the center section is now 16-inches wide. I now have plenty of room to play with.

To date I have the middle cabinet section built. The sides of the boxes are built. The drawer fronts are made. I’ve milled all of the wood for the face frames. I now have the center section of the lower face frames built. I now need to build the left and right face frames for the lowers, and make the bottoms of the boxes, and then I can start some assembly. If all goes well, I can do that next weekend.