Junior Door Sets

When you have a smaller project with raised-panel doors, standard panel bits would create panels that look out of scale with the door design. In this clip, you’ll discover the value of junior drawer sets in this type of project.

I’ve got a project that I'm working on here. It’s a pretty small scale project. It’s a little vanity cabinet for a bathroom and as I was working on the design and the raised panel doors for it, I realized that if I did a conventional three quarter inch thick raised panel door, it was going to be way out of scale for this cabinet. This is a case where I scaled the doors down and that’s what I want to tell you about is the availability of this smaller scale router bits. This is a great application for small cabinets like this; jewelry boxes, jewelry arm wires, great thing to know about. First, let’s talk about the doors. Typically, cabinet doors in the kitchen are probably three quarters of an inch or slightly more in thickness. In this project, I’ve got doors that are five eights seven inch thick. As a result to that, if I took a bit that was designed for three quarter inch material and cut these door parts with it, the profile just wouldn’t fit into the material, so I need another option. Before I talk about the bits, let me show you just the scale of what I'm talking about here. Here’s a door that was made three quarter thick with more of a conventional door set. I have a look at the profile differences here. The whiff of the profile that was routed on the raised panel here on this door compared to the one for this project. Look at how much narrow it is on this one. Additionally, the small profile, the OG profile that’s around the rails and styles is also just a little bit narrower scaled down compared to the OG profile we have on the finish door which is a little bit bigger. In the end, although, I’ve got two different profiles going here, an OG look versus a cove look. What the point is I can get the same type of beautiful raised panel door and a scale down version by going to a scale down bits. Let’s just have a look at the cutters. Here in the front, I’ve got the small bits and at the back, I’ve got the conventional bits. These, a lot of people call them junior sets. As you can see, looking at the two different bits, everything is there. This is my end-grain cutter; the next is the long-grain cutter and then finally, the panel raiser with a back cutter, so everything between the two sets is the same, just a smaller version. This junior set works for material from 716’s up to 11, 16’s of an inch thick. My conventional door set works a material from three quarters up to seven eights of an inch thick. In your arsenal of things to know about tools to apply to your wood working, keep in my mind, in the smaller scale projects, the viability of using a junior, a smaller scale set like I’ve shown you here.