Building a Range Hood

The pictures below are of the range hood I built this afternoon. It has the fan unit in back (click here for details) and a 24 inch fluorescent light in the front. The fan unit comes with a light, but it's fairly small and 40W incandecent.

The hood is going to be 24 inches about the cook-top, so the bottom material needed to be non-combustible. I used air duct sheetmetal to cover the wood. I also made an inset box for the light to sit in. The seams in the box are sealed with gray high-temp silicone caulk. This was the first time I worked with metal like this, and it came out OK. It took the better part of three hours to just do what's shown here...

Here is the top side of the hood unit.

Once the fan unit was fully in, I put the the bottom trim and top mantle pieces on. The center part in the picture already had stain on it, so it's darker.

The final thing to do is stain and apply the carving to the front.

Installing a Dish Rack

My DW finished painting the parts for the dish rack that's in the center of in the hutch, and I installed them. Here is a picture with the first plate inserted.


In most designs I looked at, the dowels were fixed, which would make cleaning difficult. I did find one at HD where they were removable, so I went with that.



It consists of upper and lower rails that hold the dowels. The top rails are about 1/4 inch thicker than the bottom ones, which allows you to slide the dowels in the top, then the bottom, and have them stay in place.

Using a Story-Stick on Cabinet Doors

When I need to do any sort of repetative work at all, I avoid using a ruler and instead use a story-stick. In this case, I needed to attach ten appliques to doors. This really helps me avoid making mistakes in measuring.



The first thing I do is cut a stick to the length of the object I am measuring against (here it's the cabinet door). Once I located the center of stick, I added marks for the top and bottom location of the applique. I also have marks on the back of the stick for side-to-side centering.

Why use this instead of a ruler?

• No chance of getting wrong number on the ruler (unfortunately that's happened a lot)
• I don't have to mark the door
• I dont have to find the center of the applique
• A ruler rolls up, the stick just stays there

Continuing with Drawers and Doors...

We completed most of the drawer construction and painting today. It was a great day to be outside (at least in western Oregon). Here are all the pull-out shelves and drawers for the island and the hutch, just prior to staining. It took about an hour and a half to sand and assemble these - I wish things went as fast as they seem to on TV programs!


The wood appliques took paint pretty well. They are die-pressed plywood, so the edges needed quite a bit of sanding to get them smooth. I did ten of them with a sanding sponge in about 1/2 an hour - not a huge amount of work. The ones shown here have primer, 3 coats of paint, a coat of glaze and three coats of clear acrylic sealer.

They are ready to be mounted to the doors tomorrow. Here is how they should look.

Building More Drawers

I'm finally back to working on the kitchen, after about a month of doing just about everything but that. The pictures below show how I assemble the sides of the pullout shelves and drawers for the island.

I went for very simple construction: butt-joints glued with polyurethane and assembled with screws. I could have done dados or even dovetails, but I have found this method to be plenty strong.

I use a small drill press and a set-up board to pre-drill the holes:


A set-up board allows me to easily drill the same distance in, and marks on the set-up board give me the location to drill:

Here are the first drawer boxes assembled. I need to put the bottoms in tomorrow.

[Link to Photos]