An idea for the perimeter machining on doors and drawers

Moderators: Jason Susnjara, Larry Epplin, Clint Buechlein, Scott G Vaal

Jesse Ogburn
New Member
Posts: 23
Joined: Fri, Mar 07 2014, 7:57AM
Company Name: Ogburns Cabinet Shop Inc
Country: UNITED STATES

An idea for the perimeter machining on doors and drawers

Postby Jesse Ogburn » Wed, Apr 26 2017, 5:11AM

Good morning all,

I had this idea to add some functionality to the door and drawer editor and I think it would be fairly easy to implement. So right now when I want to do a five piece drawer front on a job I have to cheat the system a little to get what I want. The software only allows one dimension for the width of the stile and rails but when the drawer front is pictured it show that the top and bottom rails are a different dimension. see picture.
Current drawer front.png
This is typically not a problem as far as looks is concerned. However it is not how the cut list is actually implemented. The top and bottom rails are actually the same width as the stiles in reality and that makes the panel smaller than we can machine. The only way to get the cut lists to work out is to cheat the system and make the drawer fronts overlay the cabinets by an extra .75" on the top and bottom and then, once we have the parts cut and assembled trim off the top and bottom to get the thinner top and bottom rails and end up with the correct size drawer front. See the next picture...

As you can see it looks really nasty and smashed together on the computer.
http://www.thermwood.com/forums/downloa ... w&id=15714
I have thought about it a long time and tried to think about what might be the easiest way to fix this without a lot of big changes and still get a flexible enough format that it could be useful to a lot of other people. I've thought of two ways, but I think the last one would be the easiest and the most flexible.

1. Allow the user to use different size stiles and rails on the drawers. This would be useful in that it would allow the cut list to be modified and different stock could be used. The down side is that the top and bottom rails would probably become too narrow to machine and the fronts would still have to be cheated on the software to allow bigger rails to be used and then trimmed after assembly.

2. Allow a different perimeter machining allowance for the top and bottom edges than the right and left edges. This would be the most most flexible and I think the easiest to implement. In this way the user could add to the perimeter machining allowance whatever they wanted to trim off which is technically the correct way of doing it anyway. The software would automatically add that allowance to the stiles and rails which it does already. I am guessing a bit at how the software works here, but I'm guessing it would only require the addition of a text box and label to the drawer machining options form and a variable change in the algorithm...but I'm not a software engineer so I will let that to the experts :D
Attachments
Current cheat.png

Return to “eCabinet Systems Software”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Semrush [Bot] and 13 guests