Sawdust on the Floor

Ok, let’s get busy and make the raised panels for our circuit breaker, AKA Dartboard cover. The first part is to make up the stock that will make up the raised panels. In my case, the width of the raised panels was wider then the largest stock I had on hand. Raised panels need to fit inside the grooves formed in the rails and stiles that we made yesterday. We need the raised panels to be wide enough to fit into the grooves, but not so tight that they completely fill up the groove.

Raised panels are installed loosely, that is without any glue on the raised panels, only on the actual rails and stiles. Raised panels will expand and contract with changes in humidity in your home. If they are too small they will rattle in the door, if too tight they may split when the panel expands.

Getting back to my raised panels, I realized that I needed to glue up pieces to make the panels. My widest stock was only 8” wide, I needed panels that were at least 12” wide. I could have simply added an 4” piece to the edge, but that presented a problem. My doors are made of oak, which has some interesting grain patterns. In my eye the grain patterns tend to be pretty plain near the edges of the stock. I was concerned that if I glued two pieces together with no attention to the grain patterns, I would telegraph where the glue up line was, no matter how tight it was. So I tend to glue up two full width pieces, this gives me room to trim the panel so I can get a grain pattern that looks correct.

To create the glue ups, I first ran the boards across the jointer to true up the stock. Then I ran them through the surface planer to make all of the stock the same dimension. When I had the stock ready, I played with the grain patterns to see what pieces matched best together. When I had those defined, I ran the edges that were to be glued together across the jointer again. This gave me good glue joint. When I make up panels, I simply glue them together and apply clamps while the glue dries. Because I will be cutting the raised panels into the glued up stock, I don’t use biscuits or dowels. I am concerned that I will inadvertently place a biscuit or dowel that becomes part of the raised area, and that will ruin the raised panel.

For glue up, I used at least five bar clamps for each panel. I alternate the clamps, one on top of the panel and the next under the door panel. As I add the clamps I check the alignment of the glue ups, and adjust the stock so that the boards remain even with each other. After allowing the panels to set up for a while, I remove the clamps and then do a light sanding to remove excess glue. Then I take the stock to the table saw and cut it to it final dimensions. Finally it time to make the raise panels themselves.

I make my raised panels using a router bit designed for just that purpose. I have made many raised panels over the years; I have always used a router for this. Raised panel router bits come in a multitude of designs, but there are actually only two different styles, vertical bits or horizontal bits. My original raised panel bit was a vertical bit and after using it to make raised panel doors for our original kitchen, I replaced it with a horizontal raised panel bit. The reason is that while the vertical bit did in fact make raised panels, it was very difficult to work with. When cutting a vertical profile, you must keep your stock perfectly vertical at all times, and in contact with the spinning raised panel bit. If the stock ever falls away from the true vertical orientation, the raised panel bit will take a bite out of your stock. If you’re lucky, the bite will be small then you can sand it out. However if you’re unlucky like me, the bite is deep and the piece is ruined. I added a tall vertical backer board to the fence of the shaper, to help stabilize the panel as it passed over the bit. But even with it I made a lot of extra panels because of gouges in the panels. In an effort to elevate the problem, I tried making several smaller passes; all that did was give me more of a chance to allow the gouges to happen.

Vertical Raised Panel Router Bit

Horizontal Raised Panel Router Bit

I now use a horizontal raised panel bit that I install in my shaper. Because of the size of this bit, it can not be used in a hand held router. You must either use a shaper or a router table, unless you like to spend time in the emergency room of your local hospital. In fact the typical horizontal raised panel bit should only be used on very stable router tables or shapers. I learned this the hard way.

Before I obtained my shaper table, I used a 3 HP router installed in the extension leaf of my table saw. The router was installed in a heavy duty piece of plastic that I purchased from the local woodworking store. The plastic was sold as router table insert material. After spending a large amount of time setting up the router bit height, I would run the blank stock across the bit, only to have it cut at an incorrect height, or the depth of the profile cut was not even across the entire length of the stock. After a lot of head scratching and a lot of damaged stock, I came to the conclusion that the problem was that the spinning large bits were causing the plastic to deflect. The amount of deflection was not predictable, so I had very little chance of ever getting the correct cuts on my wood. After a while, I even had problems with the smaller bits. When I attempted to do something as simple as make a dado with this setup, the depth and width of the dado would deviate.

Thinking back now, I realize that even though the literature on the insert claimed that it would handle my router; maybe I stretched the limits by trying to use the larger diameter bits. Who knows? Maybe a good question to ask is, if the table deflects or allows the router bit wobble is it something you really want to use, or is it even safe for your use. So back to my original statement, please don’t try to use a large bit like the horizontal raised panel bits in any stand that is not extremely stable.

Hey guys, sorry I got carried away, I promised to talk about making raised panels but, like I sometimes do, I wandered off on a couple of tangents. But I really feel those items are important. So please bear with me. Look for part three of this article and we will finally get to those raised panels, I promise.