Thinking about trying cabinet doors and drawers

I’m just finishing up some mudroom cabinets. Normally I’d just do a flat or shaker door since they are easy to cut but was curious if anyone has done any fancier stuff using their on their cnc. I’m thinking about just carving a single mdf slab not doing rails and panels.

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Fancier than flat or shaker is probably going to require a shaping bit, unless a square stepped profile is OK. On simple cabinets, I can imagine this working well with the right setup. I’d probably precut face stock with a circ saw, 1/4" oversized for a clean cut. Then I’d screw the material from the back, keeping edges above the table enough so the shaping bit won’t cut the table. Then I’d come in from the side with the shaping bit, using reasonable stepovers and multiple passes, to bring the edges to dimension/shape.

Not sure what CAM you use, but I know f360 has a capability to add shape cutters for this purpose. Although you don’t even need to model the shaper bit in CAM for a simple 2d cut using a 2d contour cut. You just need to know the minimum diameter on your shaping bit, and use a same diameter square bit in CAM… being careful where you plunge and lift.

1" sharper bit attached to a trim router controlled by a robot whos being fed instructions by an incompliant operator… What could go wrong?

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I mean, it can’t turn out any worse than the hand routed flat panel mdf doors I made for my garage cabinets. I don’t have a joiner or a decent table saw, so I had pilot bearing bumps marks all over my edges lol. With slightly off gcode a Cnc cut door may be 1/8” or so too big or small, but at least it will look clean. The nice thing about Cnc is it is also easy to reproduce identical panels. If they are all 1/8 too small nobody would even notice.

I accept that challenge!

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Hey good luck with it! …and remember, there’s always a heavy nap roller if you need to blend in anything, hehe. j/k :wink:

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I did some pretty big mdf panels and they turned out good. The only grip I have is that they sound shitty and cheap when they close. They don’t have a nice solid sound to them. I will try to dig up some photos

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