Espresso bar: IKEA Torhamn cabinet door hacking.
With the IKEA Sektion cabinets and the Maximera drawers hacked, it was time for the cabinet doors. This took a little more consideration than the drawers. I didn't want them to look like I, well, hacked them. Like the cabinets, I wanted them to look like they came from the factory at our custom size.
Inspecting the Torhamn doors, they were built with pretty straightforward joinery. I hatched a plan:
- Rip the door on the table saw to precisely cut off the vertical stile
- Using a 3/16" bit, take the stile to my router table and remove the material that had joined it to the rails and panel
- Taking the depth of the router, cut off the remaining door to the finished width plus that extra amount
- Using the router again, remove the material on the rails to the depth of the panel
- Slide the stile onto the new door and glue it up
Not difficult. Just precise. Worth noting: I was only hacking the width. It would be possible to cut down the height with a couple more steps.
For my project then, Step 1: Take a deep breath and rip apart these somewhat-expensive-and-now-out-of-production cabinet doors on the table saw.
Ahh, IKEA hid some dowels in there! It was a strong joint so that's not terribly surprising. Unfortunately, that'd be tricky to recreate so my doors were going to have to hold with the surface of the panel and rail tenons. The good news is that Step 1 worked. I breathed a little sigh of relief and moved onto Step 2.
It took a few passes because the depth was more than the width of the bit. Another sigh of relief as this step also worked perfectly.
Back to the table saw for Step 3:
So far so good… Now it was back to the router table to create the tenons on the rails. They of course would match the depth of the panel. Thankfully, this step also worked.
Coincidentally, K brought me our afternoon espresso as I worked on the cabinet doors for our espresso bar. Proper. After much meticulous crafting, I ended up with four doors all ready to be assembled.
Step 5 was simple. I held each new door with clamps while they dried overnight. I wanted the new ones to be as strong as the originals so after thousands of times opening and closing them they'd still hold up like new.
After they dried, they felt strong. I'm no professional finish carpenter and it shows, but these will do the trick and they don’t look hacked. Mission accomplished.
