Hand feeding the frame parts past a router bit will inevitably incur some slight dimensional deviations. A vernier caliper is invaluable for finding them.
Beaded Panel	Handmade Raised and Fielded Panel
Machine-Made Raised and Fielded Frame-and-Panel	Plant-on Frame-and-Panel
A typical raised-and-fielded panel sitting inside a frame. The highlights and shadows define the center field, helped by the rabbet which is not the same width all around. The 15° slope on the reveal of the frame makes a more appealing transition between frame and panel than would the severity of a square-edged reveal.
The four plant-on panels are divided by three muntins which are the same length as the stiles. The alignment of shoulders is a small detail in the pursuit of a simpler whole.
Cut back the panel tongues, as shown in the bottom drawing, to allow room for expansion.
Two router bits do the job. The grooves in the frame and the panel are made with a slot cutter, which come with three or four wings. The taper bit puts the chamfer around the edges of the panel.
You can see from the drawing that the mortise joint line is cut back to the line of the edge taper.
The chamfer on the reveal edge of the rail and stile meet as a miter in the corner. The joint shoulder is in line with the outer edge of the chamfer.
The back side of the joint shows how the shoulder on the mortise was re-cut to accommodate the 15° chamfer on the reveal of the frame at the front.
The frame can be machined using two (right) separate cutters or one cutter that has both profiles on the same shank (left).
The horizontal cutter can be used with the router held on top of the work, or in a router table where you feed the work across it.
This bit gives us a slope that was never contemplated by traditional furniture makers. The author considers it fine for painted work.
To hold the panel securely vertical, extend the height of the fence. With any router bit, you don’t have to make the cut all at once. To reduce the cutting load on you and the bit, remove about half the material on the first pass, then make a second and final cut.
Here you can see how the end shoulder meets the frame. It’s at this point that the edge molding is shown clearly in profile.
The sides and back were made with similar panels. The simple tongue and bead are, to my taste, the best of what a machined panel has to offer. The strong highlights and shadows made by the profiles on the edges emphasize the vertical lines of the piece but don’t intrude upon the width of the panel or disrupt the grain pattern.
This corner of a half-paneled room is a good example of manufactured sheet stock put to attractive paneling use. My thanks to David Grosz, the maker. — Ian Kirby

Part 2: Frame-and-panel Variations

In Part One of our look at frame-and-panel construction, I explained that once a way of dealing with the shrinkage and expansion of solid wood was devised using frame-and-panel construction, woodworkers had the fundamental building block that allowed for the making of durable furniture. Here I’ll explore the practical adaptations of the frame-and-panel. In terms of solid wood, little has changed with the concept of making a strong frame with a groove around its inner edge to hold a loose panel. However, the solid wood version now has a rival in the form of manufactured sheet material (MSM).

Plywood, particleboard, and medium density fiberboard don’t shrink or expand to any appreciable degree. Dimensionally stable, they don’t need to be held within a solid frame, yet this is how they are used in the manufacture of furniture and cabinets. The MSM making method may be seen as the reverse of the solid wood making method —  the panel, firmly glued into the groove of the dimensionally stable frame, is the structural element.

Solid Wood Frame-and-Panels

There are two types of frame-and-panel structures. One type sits inside the frame: for example, a typical raised-and-fielded panel. The other sits over the frame, and is commonly called a plant-on panel, although it’s held in a groove just like its cousin.

The panel inside the frame is the one preferred by carpenters and house builders for paneling walls.

The plant-on panel was preferred by furniture makers. Its construction method makes the frame subordinate to the panel. The panel’s simplicity strips away all the visual fuss of raised-and-fielded construction and encourages the maker to select and display the beauty inherent in wood.

Plant-on Panel

The plant-on panel offers the designer a radically different opportunity with which to work.

If, for instance, you can find a board or two that comes from the crotch of a tree that displays stunning color and grain pattern, the plant-on panel is the ideal way to present it because its surface won’t be disrupted by raising and fielding.

Sadly, such material was never plentiful and is becoming scarcer by the day. Fortunately, quartersawn and spalted material in narrow widths and all sorts of species is less scarce, so you can design the piece with an elegant pattern of multiple long and narrow panels. Adding additional muntins barely increases the making time and stiffens the frame structure.

Making the Plant-on Frame-and-Panel

The groove on both the frame and panel is filled with a tongue, a simple solution I like both conceptually and technically. The thickness of the tongue equals the width of the groove. So, in cutting the desired groove with the correct cutter setting, you simultaneously make the tongue.

Slot cutters come in 1/16" increments, an ample range to create the groove you want. My practice is to set the cutter to its own width above the table. Make the panel groove with the inside face down on the table. Make the frame groove with the outside face down on the table. Made to this setting, the tongue is the same dimension as the groove, which is too tight, but once you remove the machine marks by hand planing both faces, the two parts will slot and slide neatly into each other. Make test pieces to confirm the cutter settings are correct. Once you have cut all the parts to dimension, the order of work is:

• joint the frame structure
• cut the grooves in the frame-and-panel
• fit the panels in their grooves
• dry clamp the whole assembly.

Chances are that test fitting will reveal that the joint shoulder lines on the frame are no longer flush. If so, remove the panels, put the frame back together dry, and plane the frame flush on the outside face. It’s impossible to get at the shoulders with a plane and difficult with a sander after glue-up. However, you can plane the inside shoulders.

There’s no need for the panel to project above the frame more than 1/4" for furniture purposes, thicker perhaps for architectural interiors. Because a panel left square-edged looks coarse, I taper it to 15°, a simple operation on the router table with a chamfer cutter. Alternately, the edge can also be refined by a small rabbet to halve its thickness.

To make an allowance for shrinkage and expansion, cut back the tongues on the edges of the panel. Set your table saw to the height of the tongue plus 1/16" and to the correct width. This cut is best done before tapering the outside edge.

Panel Inside the Frame

What likely springs to mind when we think of a panel inside the frames is the raised-and-fielded panel door ubiquitous in even the most inexpensive kitchens.

The popularity of this construction arises from the ease with which matching router cutters, with the same setup, shape the edge of the frame all around, make the groove all around, and make the four corner joints by coping the ends of the rails. A second cutter raises and fields the panel.

The downside is that you are stuck with the same set of profiles until you acquire more cutters, and even then the range of profiles for both frame and panel is limited.

Because of the widespread use of modern router bits, the fact that the raised-and-fielded panel was traditionally a carpenter’s wall paneling construction technique is, as they say, history. It has been used on too many kitchen cabinet doors and in too many magazine projects for me to do anything but acknowledge that it’s become an accepted furniture detail. Before I deal with its construction and to keep some historical order, I will discuss its predecessor, the handmade version.

Handmade Frames

Determine the overall design by drawing the frame-and-panel at full size or, better yet, making a mock-up. Frame dimensions, more than any other element, establish the overall appearance of the work.

Four decisions are necessary when designing the frame:
• the dimensions of the stiles and rails
• the joinery
• the groove
• the outside reveal of the frame.

Dimensions of Stiles and Rails — 3/4" or better is a typical off-the-shelf thickness. However, most of what is made at 3/4" would look better at 9/16" and still be plenty strong. Try using 1/32" as the increment by which you make thickness decisions!

On a door, the width of stile and rail stock are generally the same. When there are a number of panels divided by muntins, they usually vary in width. Get the dimensions right at the design stage.

Joinery — The traditional joint is a stopped mortise-and-tenon. When the frame was made entirely by hand, the groove was cut with a plow plane. Because you can’t make a stopped groove with a hand plow plane, the tenon on the rail was made with a haunch to fill up the groove on the stile. A machine-made groove can be stopped, so in this case you don’t have to make a haunched mortise-and-tenon. How you make the joint is your call, but smooth mating faces and accurately aligned parts is the aim. With 3/4" stock, make the thickness of the tenon 3/8" ... with 9/16" stock, a 1/4" tenon is strong enough.

Groove — Even though we say “handmade” you are unlikely to make the groove with a plow plane. The groove is usually made on the table saw or with a slot cutter on a router table. The dimensions of the groove and its location on the edge of the part are entirely dependent on the panel design. It must be deep enough to allow the panel to shrink and expand. Most panels will shrink when they leave the shop, so allowing for 1/8" movement on a 10" panel is fine.

Outside Reveal of the Frame — The reveal on a handmade frame-and-panel is normally sloped to an angle of 15° rather than left square, which affects the shoulder line of the joint. On the edges of rails and stiles the angle is planed after the joint and done with a taper bit on a router, though it will need a pass with a plane to remove the cutter marks. The shoulder of the mortise has to be cut back to the line of the chamfer. Both parts of the chamfer are cut at 45° to meet in the corner.

Alternative Panels

An alternative to a raised-and-fielded panel inside a frame is seen on the cabinet in the photos accompanying this article. It has English brown oak panels inside an ebonized ash frame. The panels have a single bead on each side edge that sits about 1/2" from the stile to offer a clear view of the profile. The top and bottom have a clear shoulder with a tongue into the common groove.

Manufactured Panels

The upside to manufactured panels is that they are dimensionally stable. The downside is that their surface is visually bland.

One solution is to cover a piece of 1/2" MDF on both sides with some extraordinary veneer that would be impossible to match in solid wood. Put flat into a frame, it wouldn’t need any raising or molding in order to look terrific. Its dramatic appearance belies how easy it is to make a veneered panel, yet I rarely see it used in small shops.

Where MDF really comes into its own is for interior wall paneling with a painted finish. Its dimensional stability and smooth surface make it ideal for this purpose. Although it’s a three-layer board — the outer surfaces are denser and harder than the core — the cut surface, when primed, takes paint very well. Cutting a raised-and-fielded motif isn’t a problem. The problem is exhausting the waste from the cutter. The dust is fine, makes a terrible mess, and is bad for your lungs. Effective dust collection is a must.

In Part One of this article, I emphasized the importance of the correct proportions of the parts in a frame-and-panel system. A painted, paneled wall underscores this point.  Suppose you paint the whole thing the same color, say, white or some calm variation. You will immediately realize that the proportions stand out in stark simplicity because there is no wood grain pattern or different wood tones to distract you from the effect. Under these conditions, you may find that raising and fielding the panels creates too much detail — an excess of highlights and shadows.

It’s perfectly acceptable to leave the panels flat and attach moldings to the edge of the frame. In this example, the molding projects above the frame, as you can see by the highlights, which helps to strongly define the panel shape. Another simple detail is to further emphasize the window by wrapping it around the corners. Yet another way to emphasize the proportion of the parts is to paint the panel and frame in different tones.

Frame-and-panel Router Cutters

The absence of molding across the top and bottom edges of the panel emphasizes the vertical lines of the raised-and-fielded side edges.

Here again, like the role reversal of a solid wood panel and a MSM panel, we see a reversal in the design method when using router cutters. Using traditional tools and methods, panel dimensions plus the angle of the raising and fielding were variables to be decided at the design stage. Using fixed profile router cutters, these decisions are already made; they therefore become the starting point of design decisions. Visual success depends upon designing the width of the rails and stiles and the width of the panel to best accommodate the cutter profiles. Because the work of milling each workpiece is now the easy part of the process and because interesting selected wood comes in ever narrower dimensions, by using it you have the perfect opportunity to produce more elegant furniture.

Because it’s so easy to buzz around all four sides of the panel to make a tongue to fit the grooves, the practice is, unfortunately, much over-used. Carrying the molding across the ends causes considerable grain deflection and a confusing visual effect, especially if you have chosen a piece of flatsawn wood with a cathedral figure for the panel. The solution? Don’t shape the top and bottom edges. Simply put a shoulder and tongue on the ends of the panel. The joint shoulder line adds to the verticality of the composition. The rails are left square on the reveal.

Sideboard with Plate Stand

This sideboard was designed by Ernest Gimson in 1915. It is made of English walnut and ebony and is typical of Gimson's Arts and Crafts style.

Clearly, it is a magnificent piece of work with many features of interest to modern furniture makers, but I will confine my comments to the doors.

They are curved squares with an overlay panel set on a wide frame. The frame itself has a raising on it made so that the top and bottom edges of the raising coincide with the raised center panel of the drawers on either side of the doors. The pattern on the square overlay panel is made up of four raisings. The first raising is aligned with the raising on the flanking drawers, giving the illusion of a narrow door frame. The inner square contains a raised octagon, which was a common way of terminating the raisings.

Each raising is less than 1/16" high, but there is no doubt about its presence and its effect by way of reflected light.

The sideboard is owned by the Art Gallery and Museum in Cheltenham, England, which kindly gave me permission to use the photograph.