It’s been too long since I did a somewhat detailed how to for restoring cabinets.  So, for the first time in a few years i’m going to do one.  This time, I’m going to go through the steps I take to fix badly damaged plywood issues commonly found in Williams style cabinets.

All too often these cabinets had the leg levelers removed, sat in water, got dragged around on the edges and generally mistreated leading to some really tatty results.  The case we’re looking at now is my Sinistar.  Perfect example of this.

Now for restoring, it seems that the most popular thing to do has been to start molding bondo and going to town.  That’s easy, but for really bad damage where wood rot has set in it’s just not the best way to go about it and in most cases you end up working much harder than you have to in order to get a fragile result.  So in this tutorial i’ll show you how to fix this kind of damage with just plywood and wood glue.  No screws, nails, pocket holes, biscuits, dowels or magic glues named after apes.

Just a note about safety.  Routers are powerful and potentially dangerous tools, always respect that.  Wear protective eyewear and a mask.

The supplies you’ll need are:

• Replacement plywood.  You can get this from home depot in quarter sheets to work with.
• Trim router bit.
• Templating router bit.
• Router
• Sander with various grits (NO BELT SANDERS)
• Standard wood glue.  I like Titebond 2.
• A framing square.
• Clamps

Step 1: Survey the damage

So, you can see just how bad this is.  Wood rot has set in on the corner pretty bad and a significant area is missing.  We could certainly hit this with bond and build a new corner but it would not last long.  So, we do it using time tested woodworking methods.  First, clamp down a square to the cabinet outlining the area that we need to fix.  Allow 3/4 inches to account for the width of the router plate.  We will be using the square as a guide for the router so the piece of material we remove will be very close to a perfect square.

Step 2: Start cutting

So, now that we’ve squared off what we want to cut put your trim bit in the router and set the depth for HALF of the thickness of the wood you want to remove.  Carefully run the router along the edge of the clamped down square leading to about a half inch groove in the cabinet.

Trim Bit

Now, lower the bit carefully to it the bottom edge of the wood.  Take your time, adjust it right so you don’t cut into the cabinet bottom or kick plate.  It should be a nice clean cut.

Step 4: Cut through

Now, we have our main piece of damaged wood removed and we have a near perfect corner to work with.  Now, head to your table saw, chop saw, or have your local home store cut for you and make a piece of plywood that is about 1/4 of an inch larger than the cutout you have made.  Once you have your piece of wood, you’ll notice that the router bit left a bit of a rounded corner after cutting, a quick pass with your sander will round the corner on your replacement piece to match in a few seconds.

Step 5: New wood!

Once you have your nice new piece, test fit it a few times. It should go into the cutout area with little effort with very tight alignment. Keep adjusting with some sandpaper until it’s as tight as you think you can get it.  Once you are to that point, run some wood glue over the two edges to be glued spreading the glue for even coverage.  Do the same on the cabinet and any internal cabinet surfaces exposed by the removal of wood.  Now, here’s a very very important step.  Clamp the new piece in.  This is why we cut squares and not triangles!  Wood glue works best when solid pressure is applied by clamping and squares give you nice even sides to really crank down on and put full even pressure while the glue dries.   Starting to look promising now huh?

Step 6: Flush Sanding

Next, after allowing the glue to dry for an hour or so put some good 120 grit paper on your sander.  Keeping your sander level and using nice even passes sand the new piece flush with the original cabinet.  To test your work, close your eyes and run your hand over the seam.. if you feel the seam, keep sanding!  So now we have new wood, strong as can be with no screws, blocks etc.

Step 7: Flush Trimming

Now for some more router fun!  Take out your trim bit and put in the templating bit.  This bit is a bit different as it has a rolling bearing at the top or bottom of the bit.  For this example, i’m using a ‘top bearing’ model.

Setting up for trimming

Once you have your bit installed,  now find the edge of the wood of the cabinet you like and clamp a scrap of plywood onto the cabinet to create a guide for the router.   In the pic above you can see our glued in repair with a sheet of plywood on top.  We will be removing the wood sticking out.  At this stage, I typically put the guide about 1/16th of an inch higher than the absolute edge so I can shave off just a tiny amount all the way across not only making our repairs absolutely flush but also sharpening the edge of the wood we didn’t repair.

Carefully set your router so that the metal bearing runs against the guide wood and the blade covers the full height of the wood we want to remove.  Once you’re set, run the router and remove the material!

Step 8: Finishing up

Now, all you really have to do is repeat the process for the other sides of your replacement.. This will leave you with a perfectly square fix.  All that is left is to do some finish sanding to get rid of the sharp edges and really level out the fix to blend it with the original cabinet.   At this point, I do things like adding t-molding slots into the repair wood and with the cabinet on it’s side is a perfect time to take care of details like the bottom. I always like to sand the bottom nice and get rid of any garbage under there.

TMolding bit

Whew! that was fun huh?  Seems like a lot of work, but in the end we have a real wood repair.  We didn’t need fancy fasteners, screws or inserts and the fix is very very solid and permanent with a result that will be very hard to see even if you look for it.  Best part is, no bondo to this point..

Now, time for bondo!  For the next Restoration 101 post i’ll show how to use bondo style fillers and prime the cabinet for paint.  Remember, the golden rule is to use as little filler material as we can so we’ll only be using it to fill nicks and flaws in the wood, not replace wood.  We’ll end up using about an ounce of bondo on this entire cabinet.

Hope this series of posts helps make the process of restoration more reliable and fun for people out there just learning some basic woodworking skills.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2011 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Restoration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.