I watched an interesting youtube video about making painted cabinet doors. I need to make about 20 doors for my shop that do not need the traditional cope and stick construction. I have Frued and Rockler cope and stick router bits in different styles.
What do you think about using your CNC to making cabinet doors. Do any of you make cabinet doors on your cnc? The doors I need to make may or may not ever be painted. The video talks about using hdm (?) a type of mdf. Have any of you used this material?
A lot of questions but the cope and stick doors are a pain to make for utility use. I have made more than 100 cope and stick doors and know how but there are a lot of pieces to cut and organize, glue and then sand.
I like that fella. His channel has lots of good info on various hardware as well.
I’ve heard good things about HDM but never had the chance to use it myself. I’d recommend you give it a shot. Seems like shop doors would be a great test with very little risk.
If you do end up running some, let us know how it goes. I’ve got an entire kitchen to refinish and this might be just the ticket to pick up a large format machine (hard to do a cabinet door on a nomad )
I have made a lot of cabinet doors. If you have an entire kitchen it would likely be easier to make cope and stick doors. If painted then the referenced video would likely work fine but if you are going natural wood then cope and stick would be the way to go. I have the Frued router bits that can make extended tenon and the cutters to make glass front doors. It is a fantastic system for making traditional doors. Personally I like Shaker style and flat panels but the raised panel bit can be used for raised panel doors.
So either way to make doors is not cheap. Having a router table, router, bits, clamps etc or a CNC big enough to make cabinet doors is not cheap. But you get exactly what you want instead of what they have.
If just doing a refresh and changing the doors and drawer fronts check with a local contractor because its not cheap it may be cheaper in total.
If you are going to make a lot of doors on a continuous basis you need a lot of clamps. I have many Bessy parallel clamps but the R&R cabinet door clamps are superior for doors. You can stack them and get a lot of doors clamped at once.
I would agree. Unless you already have stacks of wood any way you make doors is expensive. For me I can make doors in multiple ways. I will have to check out the HDM to see where and how expensive it is. Regular MDF is about $50.00 at lowes. I searched for HDM but mostly found MDF. There are some light weight mdf but no HDM anywhere near me. I suspect it would be available at cabinet supply suppliers. For me that would likely be in Dallas or Houston.
@gdon_2003 , thank you for that link. The HDM looks like it would make a great Nomad spoilboard, being designed for CNC’ing. From the video it looks to be really fine-grained.
I’m in Dallas and will start looking for a source. For me, scraps from a cabinet shop would probably even be big enough (8-ish inches square…)
(hard to do a cabinet door on a nomad 
)
