Kitchen remodeling for the Aleff residence
at 140 Compton View Drive in Middletown, RI 02842
© 2010 by Peter Aleff

Carcases for drawer cabinets and sink supports:

The carcase is an open box built Euro-style, without face frames and without full tops or bottoms. It is made from ¾-inch thick solid wood or VOC-certified ApplePly and 1/2-inch thick backs in these materials or in VOC-free MDF (see page 01). 

To avoid sharp edges and corners that would get chipped or could hurt people bumping against them, all the front edges of these boxes and of the stretchers in their front openings shall be fully bull-nosed with a radius of half their thickness, and all free-standing corners at the bottom front of the outside cabinet sides in each group shall be rounded with the same radius.

The smooth transition of the rounded profile around the corners of these box fronts requires mitering of these corners.  Since a straight miter is a structurally weak joint and is not self-aligning, the top and bottom  edges of the side panels in these boxes, as well as the top and bottom stretchers between them, shall be shaped with lockmiter profiles that align the pieces and lock them in their relative positions for very strong joints.  Lockmiters also provide more glueing surface than straight miters.  All these lock-mitered edges, as well as the rabbeted edges of the back panels, shall be glued up with a fiber-filled epoxy formulated for woodworking, such as the West System or an equivalent.

The lockmiter profile has the further advantage that it can be used to join flat panels edge to edge with much less effort than biscuits or dowels. Those cabinet box components that are wider than partial width left-over ApplePly panels can therefore be built by assembling flush strips of the same material side by side, with lockmiter profiles routed into the mating edges and epoxied together.

The sketch below shows lockmiter router bits used to join panels flat and at right angles. 

If you would like to view the details of building boxes with lockmiter joints, the following web articles discuss the precise set-up and versatile use of lock miter router bits: 

The series of pages from http://www.woodshopdemos.com/cmt-lm1.htm to http://www.woodshopdemos.com/cmt-lm6.htm illustrates and describes the use of lock miter bits for making cabinet carcases and smaller boxes, from the making of the router fences and pushing jigs to the finished boxes.  This series shows not only corner joints routed with this bit, but also lock miters used to flush-join flat pieces edge to edge to make panels wider, instead of the usual butt-joints held together with biscuits.

Another simple description of the set-up procedure for lock-miter joints is posted at http://www.stuswoodworks.com/gusguild/2009/04/setting-up-a-locking-miter-bit/ 

Also, http://lumberjocks.com/topics/4362 is a forum of practical tips for using lock miter bits; see particularly the rabbeted push block with handle for guiding the stock through the router, described by Skeez about one third down the page.

See the individual drawings of the different base cabinet types on the pages beginning with page 021.

The front elevations of the three different base cabinet types are shown on the pages 024, 025, and 026 here.

Click below on links to drawings for individual parts of the project