The better custom cabinets use no mechanical fasteners to attach the face frame to the cabinet. This is true for kitchen cabinets and built-ins as well as fine furniture such as dressers, wardrobes, and armoires.  Rather than use nails, screws, or staples, they use biscuit joinery. Traditionally, this entailed cutting the a slot for each biscuit on both the face frame and the cabinet.

The latest “time saver” used by many custom cabinet shops is to cut a continuous slot in the cabinet and only cut individual biscuit slots in the face frame. The New Yankee Workshop highlighted this technique in the kitchen series.

What is not said, it “how” to complete the steps. It’s easy to do, but you are not likely to do it the easiest way – at least not the first time. Once you’ve built your cabinet body and you have completed the face frame, here is the process for joining them with biscuits.

Using a biscuit slot cutter (5/32”) in your router, place the router base on the outside of the top of the body and cut the first slot. Next move the router base to the inside of the cabinet body and to the left, right and bottom. The reason for this “not so obvious” sequence is because the face frame aligns to the cabinet with the following characteristics – the top edge of upper rail of the face is aligned with the top of the cabinet while the inside edges of the side stiles and top edge of the bottom stile align with the inside of the cabinet. When you go to cut the biscuit slots in the face frame, you can set the gap distance once and cut all the slots around the frame – just rest the cutter on the correct side of the face frame. This sequence guarantees things will line up even if the original routed slot is not perfectly centered on the cabinet. If you use some other sequence, you’ll need to adjust the biscuit cutter as you progress through your face frame sides.

Using the above process can save you an hour or more – even if you are only doing a few cabinets. It is especially helpful when the stiles on your cabinets are different widths to accommodate filing gaps, adjacent handles, etc.