I have been out of town for the last week. First for work and then to San Antonio for Alamo City Comin Con.
Before I left, I was able to finish up the main cabinet I have been working on. The doors are designed to sit inside the frames of the cabinets, which makes it a bit tricky to insure that the door doesn't hit the frame at the top and bottom, due to the rounded corners. I originally had 100 degree hinges and the doors hit the frames. I traded out to 178 degree hinges and that solved the issue. The larger degree hinge lifted the door further outside the frame to make the right clearance.
The doors are made from 3/4' MDF, which means they were too heavy for the hinges. In order to cut some of the weight out of them, I flipped them over and hogged out about 1/2" thick of material from the backs.
Here they are all nice and installed.
I also, took the time to prime the inside of the cabinets. Normally, I use Shellac based primer for all my MDF work, but that could get rather pricey for a project this big. Most of my projects are much smaller in nature and a rattle can is enough. A rattle can costs around $8.50 a can. I can buy a gallon for $50. I had tried spraying Shellac from the gallon in the past and met with some poor results. The flakes of Shellac gum up the filter in the spray gun and takes forever to clean it. With a $10 gun from Harbor Freight, it is easier to just throw it away and buy a new one.
Instead, I went with Kilz primer and reduced with Floetrol to spray in my gun. That primer is thicker than paint and I had to thin it 50% to get it to spray and it still did a poor job and took a long time to do it. I think in the future, I will just roll on the shellac and sand it smooth. Then follow up with touch up from the rattle can Shellac.
If you have had good experiences finishing MDF on a large scale project, please share your tips.
-Eric