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Compact Kitchen Island

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Rail & stile bitThis beauty is a one-piece rail and stile bit.  It's purpose is to cut those fancy profiles on the inside edge of the door frame, the groove where the door panel will reside and to cut a matching joint on the ends of the rails that will mate up perfectly with those on the stiles forming a very strong corner joint with lots of glue surface.  It's big, it's heavy and it's expensive.  It really ought to be run in a shaper or a router with at least 3 HP.  Mine is 2½ HP, it ought to handle this bit pretty easily since I don't have a large number of these joints to cut.

Routing door stileThe first pass is made using the lower part of the bit.  It routed out the panel groove and the ogee profile on the upper-inside edge of the stiles and rails alike.  The pieces are run through face-side down.  Being a long-grain pass, there is little danger of tear out at the ends and the runs go easily.

Routing rail ends.To form the tricky part, the bit is lowered and aligned using set-up blocks so that the faces will be flush when we're done.  The rails are then flipped over and the ends run through again.  This is an end-grain cut and tear-out as the bit exits the wood can be a real problem, use of a backer board helps a lot.

Dry fitting the frameOnce the parts are all cut, the pieces can be dry fitted.  You can see in the lower right corner how this joint fits together; a stub-tenon fits into the panel groove and the reverse ogee on the rail mates up perfectly with the ogee on the stile.  The inside edge profile flows around the frame and no miters are required.

Completed framesAll four door frames are completed.  Before milling, the pieces had been grain matched and marked so that each door is uniform.  The doors will vary a little from one another, but the parts of each door including the panel was matched up before we started.


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