Potato & Onion Bin – Part 2

Part two of the Potato & Onion Bin Project, focuses on the doors and getting them installed, you can read about Part 1 here which focuses on the construction of the carcass of the potato & onion bin.

With the size of the doors roughed out on scrap paper and some quick math to figure out the size of the wood door frames I was ready to start cutting some pine boards to width.  I set my table saw to 2-1/2” wide and ripped the stiles and rails for the doors.  After ripping the stock to width, I switched out my regular saw blade for the stacked dado set.  I used to blades for a 1/4” width.  I set the saw up to be centered in the middle of the 3/4” wide stock I was using and set the depth to 1/4” and created the dadoes in my door frame stock.

A after cutting everything to length and creating some tongues on the short stile that would fit in the dado of the rails I did some dry fitting of the door assembly and notice my tin fronts where just a little too long and too tall.

So I had to grab my metal shears and trim off some of the excess metal panel.

That this was a pretty cool shot of the excess trimmings below…

With everything fitting nicely after trimming the tin panels down to size I glued the doors together and gave them a quick sanding after they dried.  It is important to note that I made the doors slightly oversize of the openings they were going into so I could trim them to final size to fit.

The doors for the potato bin are pretty straightforward to install using face mounted hinges.  And fortunately for me our potato bin is going to be painted so I can putty two small errors that I made.  The first you can see in the photo below that resulted when I was building the carcass and I skewed the board a smidge as I was cutting one of the dadoes in the side.  The second error you will see in later photos when I wasn’t paying attention to where I was laying out the last hinge and put it too close to the side and lining it up with the hinges on the first two doors.  Luckily for me a little putty and you will never know after it is painted.

My method of installing the doors was pretty simple.  First I install the hinges on the carcass, make sure you pay attention so you hinges line up…  Second, I install the magnetic catch to the top of the opening for each door.  Third, I take a couple scrap pieces of wood that are 3/4” shorter than the depth of the carcass opening.  These will temporarily hold the door while I center the door in the opening crating a uniform gap around all sides of the door.

When I get everything lined up perfectly I can flip the hinges over and fasten them into place with screws.

With the door in place and hinges secured all that is left to do is layout and drill the holes for the pull.

With everything back together it was time to bring the potato & onion bin back inside to see how it works with it’s surroundings.  Next up – a design meeting and discussion about the top.