A Quiet Sunday

Our church had some special guests & there was a reception afterwards, so we didn't get home until after 3. There really wasn't a lot of time left in the day to spend making saw dust, and my back was hurting a little, so I decided to take it easy today.

So I didn't cut the back panels to size today. Instead, I glued the face frame stiles for the three good sides I have to their respective sides. To do this, I had to cut some special clamping blocks, as seen in the photo on the right.

To do the clamp up, I hot glued the long side of the block to the 6" side. I had to leave about 3/4" hanging past the edge in order to get the clamps to work right. The glue's purpose was just to keep the block from moving while I tried to get the first clamp on.

Rather than try to describe how the clamps were set up, I'm just going to show you the one of the clamp set-ups. There were three across the length of the base cabinet boards and four across the length of the upper cabinet boards.

As you can see, one clamp helped secure the clamping block to the 6" wide side with the birds mouth joint in it. Then another clamp applied clamping force through the width of the face frame stile to keep it in the birds mouth.

Here's how the whole glue-up looked with the clamps on. I had to use the K-body in the middle because the jaws were deeper than those on the Tradesman clamps. And I used one of my leg glue-ups in the middle to clear the face frame stile. This worked very well.

I left each glue-up in the clamps for about an hour. Now, as far as removing glue squeeze out, I'm a wipe-it-down-with-a-wet-paper-towel kinda guy. But at around the 30 minute mark, I did go back & cleaned out any squeeze out I missed the first time.

Here's what the two base cabinet glue-ups looked like when they were done. I have to sand all of this one night this week. I had a 500 watt light on while I took this picture. I'm assuming the variations in color are because of the glue squeeze out, but I don't recall that much squeeze out on the inside.

I did get to dry fit the glued-up sides to the base cabinet top & bottom shelves. Everything fit together okay. As you can see in the picture, I used one of my 3D squares to verify the sides were square to the shelves. Well, they were square on one side, but not on the other. Everything was cut squarely, so I'm sure I'll get everything together square when I do the next dry fit.

Anyway, I have to get some cyanoacrylate glue on my way home from work tomorrow to repair a split on the remaining side, then mix up some Bondo & fill in that kerf. Maybe I'll get some time after work one night this week.