After some practice making raised panel doors, and many visits to the BORG, I finally decided to start my kitchen cabinet project.
Before my start, there is a story here, a friend of mine had somebody from Costco to give him an estimate of the cost to reface his 10'x10' kitchen cabinets and countertop. It is a standard 10'x10' kitchen, all they will do is basically remove the doors from their old cabinet, then refinish the cabinet, and special order the doors which is made of RTF, the cheapest material in cabinet making. Of course, they will change the countertop, and do all the plumbing work. They said they had given him a lot of discount, and guess what, the final cost is $9,600 !!!!! It is crazy, even if I order it from Homedepot and ask them to install, it will at most cost no more than $6,000, plus you get either solid maple or cherry cabinet. What a scam! That's one of reason convienced me to try it myself.
I have totally bought around 200bdf of cherry special from HighlandHardwood, Inc in New Hampshire at the price of $2.40/bdf. Most of these wood has 70~80% of heartwood on one side. It is roughly planed to 7/8", so I have to use jointer to face and edge joint them before put into thickness planer. At very beginning, I got a Delta JT160 jointer, and a Delta TP305 planer. These are basically cheap tools. The JT160 can bearly keep the settings to get a constant result every time, plus it can not handle longer stock. The TP305 on the other hand are OK for the beginner, but it always leave 2" of snipe on both ends, which means there will be some waste on each of board. My Ryobi router and table combo is really a joke, it just can not handle the work at all. I ended by return it to Homedepot and get a Porter-Cable 690LRVS from amazon.com, and a good router table from Ryobi. After a lot of frustrating result from JT160 jointer, I decided to return it to lowes and change to JT360. This is a much better jointer, after several tries, I really think I should get it the first time. It is true that you get what your pay for.
Due to fact I did not record all the manufactoring process, I only have pictures after most of them are done and ready for installation. Here are the pictures.