Although as woodworkers we may spend vast portions of our time labouring fruitfully over planed surfaces or beautifully crafted joinery, with a cabinet I am rather sadly convinced that a large proportion of this labour will go unappreciated. The average customer will only appreciate your workmanship through direct contact and the contact that your customer has is usually through catches and latches, doors and drawers. If your door catches go 'crunch, k'bang', no matter how fine the dovetailing, your customer is not going to think a great deal of you.

Sadly most of the hardware that is available to us is not terrifically exciting. There is of course the magnetic catch. Now this gives a pretty nice feeling to the closure of the door. The magnet is usually fixed in place on the cabinet and a small metal striking plate affixed to the door. The strength of the magnet cannot be changed but it's attraction to the metal striking plate can be adjusted by locating the striking plate slightly off-centre, thereby reducing the grab of the magnet. My problem with magnetic catches is that the damn things are so ugly. The least unpleasant ones I can find are small barrel shaped beasts about 6 mm in diameter that fit into a hole drilled into a carcass member. But still you have got that tiny little ugly magnet staring at you every time you open the carcass door. It might suit some jobs but not that little cabinet that has had 300 hours invested in it. That deserves something better.

I am prompted to blather on like this about catches and matches by a cabinet that I delivered this month. I picked this lovely Walnut cabinet with Marquette doors up from the workshop at about lunchtime. It was a blazing hot day and I knew I had a 4 hour drive to my clients home, so I timed the journey not to get stuck in a traffic jam as I entered London. As I drove to London the skies got darker and darker and the air more and more humid and at 5 o'clock as I parked my car the skies opened. It was not just a usual summer downpour this as my mother would say,was "raining stair rods". I decided to sit it out and waited for 15 minutes while this downpour emptied itself on to the streets of London. During the storm my client arrived. Being a summers day he decided to rollerblade home from the office and arrived at his house looking like somebody had emptied a large bucket of water over him. Which is more or less what had happened. The humidity and temperature during the afternoon had gone up and down like a yo-yo and I was worried about my cabinet. Although the piece in question was largely of veneered construction and therefore relatively stable, I knew that the way that the doors would close could well be affected by the humidity,and this was my first job for this client and I was anxious that everything would be exactly right. Fortunately, with this high specification cabinet we had a high specification "Refined Biro-Spring Door Catch".

I read many years ago that James Krenoff used biro-springs to provide the bounce in his cabinet catches and ever since then I have been searching for tiny springs and have yet to find one that has better characteristics than the Bic biro spring. Bic biros are getting even harder to find these days but the type that you are looking for is the retractable Bic biro with a spring inside it. Take the pen apart, cannibalise the spring and throw away the biro. Or for this catch take two pens apart, cannibalise the springs and throw away both biros. It's an expensive process this catch making but quality never comes cheap. The next thing to do is to find yourself a bit of wood with all of the wearing characteristics and working properties of mild steel. Making catch components in spongy old walnut is no use at all - its going to wear out in two or three years. Oak is quite hard but rather coarse in texture. Maple is both hard and fine grained, though being blonde is likely to get rather grubby in use. Whilst stocks have lasted this kind of job has been a favourite for off-cuts of Rosewood and Ebony. The job consumes very little timber but is a nice contrasting detail. I think we made the catches in this Walnut cabinet in this lovely black Ebony.

The first stage of making a catch like this is to plane up a length of Rosewood

by 8mm wide by 18mm deep by 120mm long

A piece like this will make four catches. The small batch of catches can be worked on, a mortice then cut and drilled in the top and bottom surfaces and the springs and moving part of the catches fitted, the complete little catch can then be sawn of the long length and then fitted into the individual mortises. Making it in this way is more time efficient and makes the little beggars easier to handle. The first step is to cut a mortice 5mm wide,probably using a router for the moving part of the catch in the main body Then the piece can be turned over and the mortice on the underside cut to accept the springs and screws. Step three - make the moving catch itself. This is a small block of Ebony or Rosewood that fits inside the catch mortice.

The catch should be snug inside the mortice and very carefully fitted for although the catch should move easily, there shouldn't be very much looseness or play in its fit inside this mortice. The side of the mortice should be very clean and the corners nicely chiselled out. The top surface of this catch can now be shaped and there should be a small ramp to allow the door to engage the catch without any undue difficulty. There should also be a door stop. This can be in the form of a small ridge at the back of the catch or the door stop could be fitted separately at the back of the catch. My preference is to include it within the catch itself. A council of perfection here would be to have the grain on this particular component running from top to bottom, rather than from front to back. Though I must say I have not worried about this unduly, I have not had door stops break off as a consequence. It is however something to be aware of and enough meat for the doorstop should be left when designing this part of the job.

Matching the ramped front section of the catch is a small Ebony inlay which we fit to the bottom edge of the closing style of the door. This ensures two things. Firstly, that the wear point on the door will be in Ebony and therefore harder wearing and secondly, it allows us to fine tune the door catch, matching the ramp on the door on the closing style with the catch itself enables the catch to engage smoothly and sweetly with the door. We are after all seeking a Rolls Royce 'clunck-click' type of door action. This is the whole purpose of faffing around with these silly little catches. And believe me there is alot of faffing around to make a cabinet door close really nicely.

Now we come to the biro springs. You may find that you may have to cut the biro springs to length. In my experience springs are not consistent either in their length, strength or the pressure they give and you might have to pull out the springs to give yourself the tension you require. Seat the spring inside a 3 or 4 mm drilled recess. This helps the spring to give the necessary bounce to the catch and play around with the different lengths of screw and different lengths of biro springs. The drawings and dimensions I have given here are only intended as being a starting point for your own researches. I have been making this type of catch for about 15 years now and I think each time we make each slightly differently.

Once your catch seems to be operating relatively sweetly in its Ebony or Rosewood mortice, cut the piece to length, mortice out your cabinet to accept the catch and fit it into the job. I have found that a catch of this type can be adjusted, if too small holes are drilled to the bottom of the cabinet mortice allowing a thin screwdriver to be inserted from the underside of the cabinet. Bear in mind that you will need at least one of these catches upon each door. If the door is larger than about 600 ml in height, it may be necessary for you to have two catches, one at the top and one at the bottom. But where you can get away with one, that generally give a sweeter closing door.

My cabinet was installed in the clients home and it transpired I needn't have worried about the doors because they opened and closed even after the rainstorm but I knew that even if something had gone amiss I could have just taken a thin bladed screwdriver and tweaked the very fine biro spring catch to give the perfect client pleasing 'click-click' every time the door was opened or closed.