Okay, so before we install the cabinets, I wanted to just sit here and have a little backyard chat with you for a minute And talk about some of the fasteners that are available to use when you’re installing cabinets.
And we’re gonna go over which ones here are appropriate and which ones are not. So I wanna start off with these here so you can see ’em I use these a lot for putting together wood studs and stuff, but even though these are a great screw and even though they’re exterior and you know, pretty tough and everything, these are not appropriate, in my opinion, for doing cabinets. You maybe could get away with using them in the back of the cabinet to screw them to the wall. The reason why is look at the thread.
See, this is a very coarse thread screw here. So you don’t wanna use a screw like this when you’re trying to put two cabinets side by side, together, The idea is you have kind of coarse grain and then you have fine grain screws, And whenever you’re hooking two cabinets together like this, side by side, you want to use the fine grain screw, And that’s where something like this one comes in to, this one I like,
Even though this is meant here for doing for, you know, going into a metal type stud, see, this has a fine grain as well as a self drill point at the end of it, So, lemme show you what this looks like,
Now these are small and short and everything, so these really don’t have much use, It’s the bigger one that I use here, And I even like the bigger one and I’ll show you why, Because see, it has the square drive and the fine thread, So with a square drive head on it, and you see how small and low profile that head is and that’s a square drive,
You use a square bit instead of a Phillip’s head bit and it never slips out, That’s what I love about these And these are very low profile heads, so these are appropriate for putting, going sideways through the frame of your cabinet into the cabinet next to you, so that it ties them both together, And see that really fine grain thread there? That fine thread will suck the two cabinets together nice and tight. The best way to do this is you just drill a pilot hole through, a pilot hole through the frame of the first cabinet and then in just a teeny bit into the second one.
You don’t wanna drill a pilot hole through both of the cabinets because you want meat for the screw to grab onto when you put it in, okay? So, this is an appropriate type one that you would wanna use. This is another one that is not appropriate This is your regular drywall screw. I’ve seen a lot of us guys use drywall screws and that’s why they end up with a gap behind, you know, between the two cabinets. Want you to take a look at this picture here that has the big gap on it, and I want you to ask yourself, “Is this how I want my two cabinets to line up with this coarse grain screw?” Do you want it to look like this or do you want it to look like this? So you see how there’s no gap at all? There’s just a nice hairline little crack between.
There’s no big, black, ugly space that you would see in between there. That’s the way you want it to look. And you know, people have to keep in mind too, just ’cause you’re looking at the edge of a cabinet, that doesn’t mean that it’s perfectly straight. Wood is not straight. Wood has a curve to it.
Whether or not your eye can see it, but when you go to put two side by side pieces together, that’s when you find out that it’s not always exactly straight, which is why you’ll be putting in, if you’ve gotta use this screw here, to screw two cabinets side by side, you’ll be going every few inches up, in order to just suck that crack in so that you can barely see it. So it just looks like a hairline. Now these screws here, I like to use a lot. These are my go-to screws and I have like all sorts of sizes of these starting at 1 1/2 going to 2, 2 1/12, all the way up to 3. And I like these for a couple of reasons.
So if you look at these screws, first of all, you got the white head on there. And that’s a star head that’s on there. And these come with their own bit. Let me see if I’ve got one in here in one of these here. So let me pull this one out here.
So these come with their own bit that you stick in your drill and that’s a star bit. And again, these won’t slip either I’ve never had one of these slip, ever. They’re just beautiful. And so these are also, these screws here, if you look at ’em, they’re in between of the fine that I prefer and the coarse.
So, these are pretty adequate in most cases to use as well. All right, so another fastener type thing here that I don’t think is really appropriate anymore are these finishing washers. And what these are, these are these little washers here that you’ll sometimes see installers use. And what they do is they take their screw and they run it through the washer so that when they screw it into the back of the cabinet heresee? That’s what it looks like. Looks a little bit on the tacky side. But why in the world folks would you wanna go through all of this nonsense when you’ve already got the right screw right here and here? This already has a nice flathead built on it and with everything and this is appropriate to go right up against that surface. These screws are not.
And then all you’re gonna do is, you know, leave an imprint in the wood with that ring there, so, that washer So, instead of going this route and by the way, you have a thicker thread anyway, you wanna go this route with the finer thread. So, let’s compare the two If you look at them side by side there, you can see how the cabinet screw that I prefer to use has a finer thread anyway. It’s a much more appropriate fastener for using on the cabinets.
And I’ll show you something else too. When I’m using this other one here, this is the finishing screw here, sometimes we will still go ahead and use this thing here. These are our little drill bits here. And these are used for doing your countersink here. These are special countersink bits.
So see how they’re angled right there? What they do is they’ll drill a hole that’s shaped for this type of a head ’cause you want the head to lay in there flat. You don’t want your head to come chewing into the wood at the last minute and possibly causing a split or crack. Whenever you’re hanging cabinets, that’s what you’re trying to avoid because once you make that one crack, that’s it. You’ve ruined it. You don’t get a second chance to fix that.
So that’s why it’s important to drill that pilot hole when you’re putting two cabinets side by side, like this. So say this is one cabinet and this is the other, and you’ll see it later in the video, you put ’em side by side, you’re gonna drill a pilot hole all the way through the first one and just barely touch the second one with it and let the screw come in and grab all of the meat. So here’s your screw, it’s gonna come in like this and it’s gonna go all the way in it and it’ll grab that meat by itself. You don’t need to make a hole all the way through. You just need to get the little thing started.
That’s what keeps it from splitting And I also wanted to touch on the drill I’m gonna show you that in a minute, but basically, I prefer to leave my drill setting on 1 and use an impact driver on setting 1 And the reason for that is that once your screw is going in and you’re going (whirring), right when you get to, near the very end, it senses and knows all the resistance, that you’re getting near the end of the screw and it starts clicking and it’ll go like (clicking), very, very slowly, you don’t wanna come in on full speed number 3 and go (fast whirring) and run that screw into there It’ll split your wood
So you’re not here to be a macho neanderthal here. Hanging cabinets sometimes requires a touch of a surgeon, a gentle touch of a surgeon, not a neanderthal. Okay, so just a little review here. On the top here, you’re looking at the screws that we prefer to use compared to the screws that we prefer not to use. And we don’t want these because they’re a coarse grain. And we do want these because they are a finer grain. We don’t need these. Because if you’re using this type of screw right here, it’s already got it’s own washer head built on to it. You don’t need anything else. You’re just doubling the work and the cost.