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.

This is the start of a series of wood working and hope shop articles which will give hints and tips for various projects you may have seen on TV or in magazines. All of the articles will get tagged so they are easy to find and some will be multi-part posts. The purpose is to fill in the gaps from what you find elsewhere with things you usually don’t figure out until its too late.

There will be posts on projects, tools, and one of the most prevalent companions of the wood working shop – jigs. Most of the upcoming material will be wood working but there will also be articles on refinishing, repurposing, and restoring as well as a small amount of metal working.

Many of the project will use eco-friendly materials or salvaged wood such as bamboo, barn boards, old furniture and flooring. When an idea comes from an external source such as PBS’s The New Yankee Workshop or periodicals like Shop Notes or simply a picture in a magazine, You’ll find links to the original source as well and any related sources I locate.

You are encouraged to post questions, comments, and notes about your own projects in the "comments" section. for each article. You can also suggest its you’d like covered.

First up is a series of articles on building kitchen cabinets. This will be a multi-post series and will focus on using worksheets for building cabinets and highlighting those "undocumented" steps that make the difference between days and weeks in a project. The same techniques work for completing any built-ins – home office, a small wet bar, etc.

So, if you love the smell of sawdust, or are just curious enough to daydream through those how-to shows, stay tuned and leave your comments !