 In this video, I'm going to show you how I changed this cabinet from opening like this, to opening like this. This cabinet is my most used cabinet in the workshop, and that's because it's got my Coralist drills, all my drill bits, drivers, and my most used fasteners. I like keeping those things in this cabinet because this is kind of the central part of my workshop, and I spend most of my time in this area. More often than not, I find this cabinet door is open and that means I'm always running into it here. It's in the way of the miter saw, and when I want to close it, usually there's stuff in the way here that I have to move. It's just annoying all around. Now, there's probably a lot of solutions to this problem, like just moving my most used tools to a different location, something more accessible, or removing the cabinet door. But that wouldn't be a very fun project and not a very interesting video. So instead, I've designed an overly engineered cabinet door that lifts vertically instead of swings horizontally like most cabinets. I have a few goals for this project. First, the door needs to not be in the way when it's open to solve my main complaint. It also needs to minimize impact to the storage inside the cabinet so I can still put stuff in there. It needs to be easy to open and close, because if it's not convenient, then it'll be worse than it is now. And lastly, I want it to be able to revert to the original hinged door. My shop is always evolving, and I may end up moving this cabinet in the future, so anything I add to the cabinet needs to be easily removable. Step one, clear out everything in this cabinet. I'm going to be using my CNC router to cut out the majority of the parts for this project. A project like this one that has complex motion is best worked out on the computer first. That means I have all the necessary files to also cut out the parts on the CNC. These parts have lots of curves and holes, which make them perfect for cutting out with the CNC router. I've been trying out different ways to film cutting out parts on the CNC, and I am quite surprised at how well this dust chute still works with a large section of the brush missing. This dust chute was originally just going to be used while filming, but I've been using it all the time now because it's nice to keep an eye on what's happening at the bit. To keep the parts held down on the CNC, I used tabs, which I cleaned up using a handsaw and then on the router table with a flush trim bit. This is the first base plate for the lift mechanism, and it's got the two pivot points for the four bar linkage and the cut out where the gas spring is going to live. And that fits inside the cabinet like this, except I forgot to account for this strip of plywood and this strip of plywood in the back of the cabinet. So it doesn't quite fit yet, but I can knock those off on bandsaw. Nice. I also cut out the left side, which is just an exact mirror image of the right. The link arms are also cut out with the CNC, but for these parts, I'm using nicer Baltic Birch plywood. I want these arms to be as strong as possible, so I think this is the best choice for these parts without going to metal. I finished cutting out all of the linkages on the CNC machine, and now we can start to see how this is going to come together. We've got a lower link arm here, a upper link arm that goes here. This link will attach to the cabinet door and connect these two arms, and that'll create the four bar linkage and allow the cabinet door to open parallel to the cabinet. To make these linkages work, we need an axle at each one of these pivot points. And the first thing that comes to mind is using a T-nut and a shoulder bolt. And by mounting the T-nut to the backside of this base plate, we can secure a shoulder bolt through it, and that could provide an axle. However, these T-nuts are fairly small, and they just pound in from the back, and I don't think that that's going to be secure enough to stand up over time with this cabinet door opening and closing. And so I want to make a larger version of a T-nut out of some 3-8s aluminum. And here's an example of one that I've already made. It's got the same threaded hole in the center, but it's got three holes around the outside and a larger footprint that will make fastening this to the base plate much more secure. This is the first time that I've cut aluminum using the CNC router. Drilling holes is not too difficult, but cutting is a different story. You can see here that I used a V-bit to mark the outline of each T-nut, so I can cut them down on the miter saw first. From the little cutting I've done so far, I've learned that it's a lot easier to cut around the perimeter of a part instead of plowing right through the middle. So for these, I'll cut them out individually before putting them back on the CNC to cut the outside shape. This has been working really well for me, and with each part I'm getting better and learning more. Oh yeah, it's going to be way better than those little T-nuts. That works really well. To help open and close the cabinet door with this linkage, I'm going to be using this gas spring, and that means I need a couple of mounting points here and here, and I decided to make those out of aluminum as well just because there's going to be a lot of load on them and I want those to hold up, especially with threads. These are the ones that I cut out on the CNC already, and they have a threaded hole at the end of them for the ball socket to thread onto, and that attaches to the gas spring, and then there's a couple of mounting holes for each one. One of them goes on the lower arm, and the other one will be mounted to the base plate, and between those two points the gas spring can attach. Now if I designed everything in the computer right, this in theory should retract nice. So the way I drew everything in the computer is that at the full extension, the gas spring is almost all the way extended with a little bit more to go so that there is nice tension at the top. The two linkages bottom out on each other at the top, and that's what prevents it from going too far. And on the retraction, the gas spring actually over-centers and starts extending the other way, and that will help keep the cabinet door shut as now there's always a constant tension on it in the closed direction. One thing I just noticed after assembling this is that the heads of these screws actually run into the edge of my base plate here, and they prevent it from retracting all the way. As you can see right there it hits, but in reality the arm needs to go in a little bit further. But that's not too bad of a fix. I'll just drill out with a Forstner bit at the drill press, some clearance for the head of that screw. I need to add spacers to the backside of each lift mechanism. This will space the base plate away from the inside of the cabinet so that the link arms will clear the face frame of the cabinet. Now that I've got both lift arms attached to the cabinet, I've been thinking about how to mount the door, and this is what I've come up with. To make sure the arms are parallel and the correct distance from each other, I'm going to take some washers underneath the ends of the link arms, and this is the same washer that is used at each pivot point. That'll ensure that these arms are parallel and being held away from the base plate the same distance. I've also put a screw in on each side, and that just allows me to open these lift arms just a little bit without them going all the way to the top. These two arms are what's going to attach to the cabinet, and I'm going to space them out with some wedges. That'll make sure that they're sticking out past the face frame of the cabinet so that I can line up the cabinet door to these. Okay, after messing with some shim pieces, you can see that this arm is sticking out just past the face frame of the cabinet. To help position the cabinet, I cut these two spacers, and I'm going to tape these to the underside of the cabinet, and that'll give me a reference point so that I can hang the cabinet on these, and it'll be sitting in the correct height. I've also already put pieces of tape here on the corners, and that'll help me line up the cabinet left to right. Now that I've got the lift arms in place, I'm going to use a method that's often used for hanging drawer fronts on drawers, and that's using some blue tape on both the link arm and the back of the cabinet door. With the blue tape here, I can now go ahead and apply some super glue to the link arms and then some accelerator to the cabinet door, and then I'll press them in place and hold it until the super glue kicks over. To make sure I don't poke out the front of the cabinet door with these screws, I cut them to the right length. As you can see, here's the screw I started with, and here's the one I cut. This one won't poke through the front, and the other benefit of this screw is that I got rid of the first four threads that don't really engage much wood anyway, and since I'm only going in through three-quarters of an inch of wood here, it's nice that I'll have full threads into that three-quarter inch stick, and that should hold pretty good. It works. It works. Look at that. It works great, but it definitely needs a handle. So I cut out a simple one out of some scrap maple, and I screwed it to the underside of the cabinet door. I took it all apart again and painted the link arms red to match the rest of my shop projects, and sprayed clear lacquer on the handle and some of the other wood parts, and I even added a little graphic on the side just for fun. It's always really cool to see an idea come to life, and I'm really excited to start using this. I think it's going to help solve my original problems, plus it's just so fun to open and close. I'm sure I'm going to enjoy using it. If I were going to build this system again, there's a couple of things I would do differently, and one of those would be to address the amount of slop in the mechanism. Towards the bottom, especially, there's a little bit of wiggle room, and that causes the arms to rub on the sides a little bit, and it's just not as stiff as it could be. I did my best using bushings and accurately cut parts, but I might just be at the limit of the wooden components. I initially thought about adding cross members between these link arms, but any cross member here is just going to get in the way of stuff in the cabinet, so I'd have to come up with something else there. The other thing I would do, and I probably still will in the future, is to add a soft close on the bottom. You can get cabinet plungers for retrofitting onto normal hinged cabinet doors that dampen the closing, and I think that would help to make this closing experience a little bit nicer. I'm sure someone would point out how I've reduced the amount of space in my cabinet by adding these mechanisms, and I have lost about two inches on either side due to the mechanism, but if you remember from the original shots in the beginning, this cabinet wasn't terribly organized to begin with, and there was a lot of wasted space, so I'm going to take the opportunity now to build new organizers that fill this cabinet out better, and we'll actually be able to put more stuff in than before, even though I have these lift mechanisms. My basic thought on how to do that is just to add in some new side panels right next to the lift mechanisms, and I'll be able to then build shelves and different organizers off of those new side walls, but that'll have to be a project for another time. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll catch you in the next project.