Millwork, Furniture and Fixture Fabrication
This domain tests fabrication of complete assemblies - casework, architectural millwork, furniture and store fixtures - where construction method, material behaviour and quality control all meet. Questions ask you to choose a carcass system, design for wood movement, and judge whether a finished unit meets the specified grade.
Casework construction
- Face-frame cabinets use a structural frame over a box; frameless cabinets use the 32 mm system of drilled holes for adjustable shelves and hardware, with edgebanded panels.
- Carcass joinery: dado, dowel, confirmat or cam-and-bolt; the back panel sits in a rabbet or groove and squares the box.
- Web frames and dust panels stiffen wide cases and separate drawers.
- Specify and build to the project's architectural woodwork grade - economy, custom or premium - because it controls joinery visibility, veneer matching and tolerances.
Designing for movement
- Frame-and-panel work: the panel floats in its groove with roughly 2 mm clearance per side, pinned only at the centre so it can move.
- Tabletops and breadboard ends need allowance for width movement across the grain.
- Solid edging on a veneered panel must be applied so it does not fight the substrate.
Furniture and fixtures
- Tables: apron-to-leg mortise and tenon, with the top fastened by buttons or figure-eight fasteners that allow movement.
- Drawers: dovetailed boxes, with the bottom floating in grooves rather than glued all round.
- Retail fixtures take heavy, repeated loads - check fastener spacing, shelf loading and the fixing back to structure.
Quality control
- Check square, flatness, hardware function, finish consistency and edge quality before the unit leaves the bench.
- Compare against the shop drawing and hardware schedule, not against memory.
Worked example
A frame-and-panel door comes back from a dry building with a split down the centre of the panel. Reasoning: the panel was glued into the groove along its full perimeter, so when it shrank in service the fibres could not move and tore. The correction is construction, not repair: cut the panel to allow about 2 mm clearance per side, finish the panel before assembly, and pin or glue only the centre of the top and bottom rails. Rebuilding with a wider panel would fail again in the next heating season.
Traps that cost marks
- Gluing a floating panel all round, or finishing only after assembly.
- Fastening a solid top rigidly across its width.
- Mixing face-frame and frameless hardware assumptions without checking the drilling pattern.
- Judging quality by appearance while ignoring square, flatness and hardware function.