hardware

[leigh mills]

when you apply hardware to a cabinet such as hinges and rails, does this order them individually? or is it just to get the holes located in the correct position and also so the customer can see what it will look like

[Gene Davis]

The only hardware that can be applied is that seen in the program, and that list generally corresponds to items available from Thermwood via the Woodworkers Wholesale cooperative, a business unit of Thermwood.

I say "generally" because the coop may have additional items not included in the selections the program displays.

You might want to build your program around Mepla slides and Salice hinges, in which case you need to do workarounds to be able to interpret the buy lists that the program generates for batch jobs or "room" jobs. You might use, for example, a MEPLA 001 slide, but the slide you associate with the cabinet is one of the Blum ones in the program. Let's say it is called the Blum X002. You build yourself a lookup spreadsheet on paper or in another program, such as Excel, that tables Blum X002 as MEPLA 001, and your buy lists are thus interpreted.

Associating hole patterns with the hardware and "attaching" the hardware to cabinets via setting the defaults, will cause holes per the patterns to be in the cabinet parts, per your pattern details.

The hardware itself is not modeled in the cabinets. Only the holes, per your patterns, are shown.

Take a look at some of the patterns that come with the program. As an example, pull up the pattern that relates to a Blum Tandem drawer slide. What Thermwood has done is to produce a pattern that has just about all the holes for the cabinet side of the slide. Typically, those slides are mounted with just two or three screws, thus the pattern may not work for you.

Furthermore, the patterns already done for you by Thermwood and in the program's pattern directory, have the hole depth set at only a millimeter or so.

I wanted all my hardware holes to be of a depth appropriate for what screw was to be used, and so did new patterns with depths set at 12mm and deeper.

[Jason Susnjara]

Hi Leigh

We have a series of slides, and hinges that when used in a cabinet and room will total the amount needed for the job. For example, if you have 4 hinges on a 30" base cabinet, and there are 10 of those cabinets in a room, the total it will show is 40 hinges. This will be located in your buylist. From there you can purchase those 40 hinges or you can add/subtract from that amount. The hole patterns are also there for adding the holes to the doors, and end panels for the slides and hinges so that the machine will cut and drill them out from the nest.


Hi Gene,

Because we give the software away for free, we need to make money by selling componenets through the software. That is why we have the hinges, slides and other products in the software becasue that is what we sell. If you do not plan on purchasing through the program then you can use the buylist to get the quantity that you need to purchase. We then created hole patterns for all of the hinges and slides that are sold through the co-op to make it easier for the first time user. Because every cabinet shop might use a different set of holes for a slide, we included all of the holes. If you want to use only three of the holes, then you can use the Hardware Hole Editor to create those holes or delete the holes that you do not want to use from the original pattern. The same goes for the depth of the holes. Some shops might want a location for the holes (1/16 deep for example) and some want a pilot hole to be drilled. You can also change the depth of these holes as well.