How To Build Raised Panel Doors

Apply glue with a brush to the inside of the stile where the rail meets it and insert the rail tenon.

How to build raised panel doors.

All the methods however fall into two different camps. There are lots of different choices and lots of different hardware considerations but one door style that makers come back to time and time again is the frame and panel door and particularly the raised panel door. Traditional raised panels appear in almost every furniture style since roman times though the way to make them varies wildly. The center panel which floats in the frame is a raised piece of solid wood a flat piece of plywood also works.

Begin assembly of the door. In a frame and panel construction a large panel is fitted into a groove in the interior edge of a more dimensionally stable frame made of narrow. One method is to use a tool that is specially designed to do the job such as a panel raising plane or a panel raising router cutter. The doors i build this way often are referred to as shaker style.

Take your time to get the router bits set up correctly test fit everything before gluing and you can produce fine looking doors for any kind of project. Building raised panel doors is mostly an exercise in setup and patience. Cabinets usually need a door or two and deciding on the style of the door can be make or break the appearance of the piece. Ordinarily this will be the width of a table saw blade.

Raised panel doors are an example of frame and panel construction a method developed hundreds of years ago to combat the effects of moisture on solid wood used in cabinetry and furniture making.