Cabinet

Also called: cupboard, carcase, casework

A cabinet-maker makes most of the wooden furnishings of a house, whether for use or for ornament. The basic box structure of a piece, its sides, top, bottom and back before any doors, drawers or mouldings are added, is called the carcase.

The trade behind the carcase

Some of what a cabinet-maker produces is large and plain rather than small and highly decorative. In most large workshops, only one side of the trade is taught to a given worker. Hasluck (1897) put it plainly: 'Most of the large workshops make only either carcase-work or chairwork, and the workman is trained to the one or the other.' A carcase maker typically knows nothing of chair-making, just as a chair-maker knows nothing of carcase-work, and some workshop hands are trained only to operate a machine. Wood-turners and wood-carvers work alongside this specialisation as auxiliary trades, supporting joiners, cabinet-makers, pattern-makers and pianoforte-makers alike.

Building the carcase

Work on a cabinet starts by cutting the timber stock, called stuff in the trade, to rough length, with extra allowed for working it down to size and for cutting joints. Where a cornice rail, the rail running below a cabinet's top moulding, must run the full width of the piece without a break, the carcase ends have to be cut away by the rail's thickness to let it pass through. Cutting the tail, the projecting wedge-shaped part of a dovetail joint, on a carcase rail is the opening step of a machine-cut slot dovetail, a dovetail cut as a stopped housing rather than as a joint that goes right through the wood. A marking gauge transfers the rail's thickness onto the carcase side, and correct shoulder-to-shoulder spacing, the matching distance between the shoulders of opposing joints on a rail that keeps the carcase square once assembled, is checked by dry-assembling the carcase, fitting the parts together without glue, before gluing it for real. A spline, a thin loose strip of wood glued into two matching grooves to strengthen or align a joint, fitted into a carcase side is only sunk part-way into the side's thickness, not right through it. Nearly all the carcase joints Frid (1979) covers in his book are strong enough for any carcase use, apart from the cases he flags as exceptions.

Backs, bottoms and fitted frames

A frame is sometimes let into the carcase rather than built as part of it. The simplest method fits a plain frame into a rebate, a rectangular step cut along an edge, cut into the carcase, and countersunk screws set at a slight angle hold the frame, with brass screws preferred for better-quality work. A more built-up method instead cuts a rebate on the outer face of the frame, forming a tongue that engages a matching groove in the carcase, and the carcase bottom is normally set back to line up with that rebate or groove. Screwing the back directly onto that recessed edge makes the glue-up easier. Where the top and bottom are glued straight into the carcase, as with deal (a general trade term for pine or fir timber), a shoulder, the flat step a joint butts against, is then cut on the cupboard bottom. An alternative way to build a carcase side uses blockboard, a manufactured board of solid wood strips sandwiched between veneers, or multi-ply, veneering both faces together in a single pass.

Fitting doors, drawers and dust hoods

A drawer is easier to build and fit before the cabinet top is permanently attached. A stile and its neighbouring rail can be marked where the two overhang the cabinet, so the excess can be trimmed away later. While paring end grain, the surface left where the wood's fibres are cut across rather than along their length, off the pins of a dovetail joint, the plane is tilted so its cutting force pushes toward the cabinet rather than away from it. To fit a dust hood, a shaped cover fitted to keep dust off what it encloses, the outline is measured, transferred to the cabinet back, and the opening then cut. In one tool-storage cabinet, strips of quarter-inch plywood fixed to the cabinet sides create the slots that bit drawers slide into, and at one stage in building it the cabinet back stays off, with the compartment side only clamped rather than fixed permanently. In another project, an MDF cabinet-front panel is dry-fitted and then trimmed with a surrounding hardwood moulding.

Hinges, decoration and routing pipework

When a hinge is let entirely into the door, meaning recessed flush rather than fixed to the surface, a gauge set to the exact thickness of its knuckle, the cylindrical part a hinge pin passes through, is used to mark the door. Splitting the hinge between the door and the carcase, so that one wing, or leaf, one of a hinge's two flat plates, is let into the door and its partner is let into the carcase or the door jamb, shares the door's weight between the two instead of leaving the screws to carry all of it. To fit a hinge, the marking gauge is set to the hinge's full width, and a guide line is gauged just inside the carcase end's face before fitting. A lining piece, a strip of timber applied to a carcase end, can be added there so the end reads as a pilaster, a flat strip applied to a surface to look like a supporting column, though it carries no load; the moulding used to finish it is chosen partly because it hides the lining piece's joint. A vertical plumbing chase, a boxed-in channel that hides pipework, can be built into a kitchen cabinet as a fallback routing option when other routes are not possible, since plumbing can instead be run inside the wall at a shower stall's end, or through the back of a cabinet.