Frame and panel
Also called: framed and panelled, frame-and-panel
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Frame and panel is a way of building a flat wooden surface, most often a door or a piece of casework, from a rigid outer frame with a thinner panel fitted loose inside it, rather than as a single solid board. It is the ordinary way both doors and cabinet casework get built.
Why it is built this way
Wood moves as humidity changes, expanding and contracting far more across the grain than along it. A panel fixed at just two points, pinned at the centre of its top and bottom edges only, is free to grow and shrink inside the frame around it. The frame that surrounds the panel barely moves along its own grain when humidity changes, so its overall size stays put. Building this way, rather than from a single solid board, is what has traditionally kept wood movement from working against a piece of furniture, and it also means the end grain, the surface left where the panel's fibres are cut across rather than along their length, does not show once the panel is fitted.
How it is made
The frame is commonly joined with a stub tenon, a short tenon that fits into a groove without running the panel's full width. Where that stub tenon needs adjustment, thin shims packed alongside it can bring the fit right. A production shop kitted out for the work uses the shaper, a machine that spins a shaped cutter to form mouldings and grooves, to do frame-and-panel work. A frame-and-panelled door often carries its inner edge worked to a moulding or a chamfer, an edge cut away at an angle, and this treatment is common in good handmade work.
Where it is used, and where it needs care
Traditional solid-wood frame-and-panel construction still turns up today: in high-quality reproductions, in decent-quality pine furniture, and among small workshops and designer-makers, continuing a practice that goes back centuries. Fitting a lipping, a strip fixed along the end of a top to cover its edge, onto a tabletop for appearance or added stability is not something to do without thought, since doing so introduces cross-grain construction: wood joined so the grain of one piece runs across the grain of another.