SkillsUSA Tests Students’ Cabinetmaking Abilities in a Race Against Time

Photos by Kristine Cox, Rowland Woodworking

Fifty-five competitors representing high schools and colleges from around the country had merely eight hours to create a highly customized standing cabinet. At the end of the day, only six of them departed Atlanta with a medal in the 2023 SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking competition.

The Cabinetmaking contest was one of 110 separate events held during the annual SkillsUSA National Leadership & Skills Conference, June 18-24 at the Georgia World Congress Center. In addition to Cabinetmaking, more than 6,500 students competed for gold, silver, and bronze medals in a far-flung variety of events including Carpentry, CNC Programming, Baking, and T-shirt design.

Each of the students earned a berth in the national championships by taking first place in their respective state competitions.

Winners of this year’s SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking competition included:

Postsecondary/College
Gold: Ethan Dalton, Anthis Career Center, Fort Wayne, IN
Silver: Ethan Jacobson, Utah Valley University, Orem, UT
Bronze: Luke Laing, Alexandria Technical & Community College, Alexandria, MN

Secondary/High School
Gold: Matthew Holden, Mt. Pleasant High School, Mt. Pleasant, TN
Silver: Clay Beal, West Henderson High School, Hendersonville, NC (WCA EDUcation member)
Bronze: Jerald Wetzel, Bonduel High School, Bonduel, WI

Clay Beal of West Henderson High School won a silver medal this year. He won a bronze medal in SkillsUSA 2022.

Project Overview
The contestants were tasked with building a free-standing cabinet with the materials and drawings supplied. Features of the cabinet included an 11-piece door, a top with a trapezoid plywood core with hardwood edges, a drawer, a base shelf, and tapered legs.

To create the cabinets, the students were required to read the drawings, lay out, and cut out the parts using a table saw, band saw, hand drill, hinge boring machine, and various other hand tools. Adding to the challenge, they had the pressure of working in tight quarters surrounded by their competitors while the clock was ticking down to complete their projects. They were judged on how well their assembled cabinet met the specified tolerances and aesthetics of the design.

Kent Gilchrist, technical chair of SkillsUSA and a member of the Woodwork Career Alliance Board of Directors, developed the prototype of this year’s project.

“When I came up with the concept, I started with an art nouveau style,” Gilchrist said. “I scaled it back somewhat, but still wanted to do something with curves to make the project more interesting and challenging. For example, each of the curved muntin bars on the door has a hand-cut tenon at the end to insert into the grooves of the adjoining bar.”

“So much of what we are doing in industry today is automated,” Gilchrist added. ”What’s not automated are the measuring and layout components of the project. You still have to be able to do that.”

Three Major Project Challenges
Of the 55 students who competed – 41 high school, 14 postsecondary – only five or six of them completed the project within the allotted time and none without errors. The fact that mistakes will be made is a given as this is probably the most demanding project any of the competitors has tackled, Gilchrist said. The keys to winning a medal included minimizing mistakes by thinking through the creation of the individual components and managing time effectively.

Gilchrist pointed to three of the most challenging aspects the competitors faced to replicate the prototype cabinet.

THE DOOR: The 11-piece door consisted of two sold wood stiles, two solid wood rails, three solid wood curved muntin bars – all ¾ inch — and four pieces of 1/4-inch veneered panel. “To save them time, the muntin bars had grooves cut on each side to receive the veneered panels that they cut to size and shape using a template on a bandsaw,” Gilchrist said.

“There actually were two sets of these veneer panels with the inlaid muntin bars, one for the door and one for the back of the cabinet. I wanted them to do that because we do so much panel work in the industry. It emphasized the need to accurately measure and lay out the components.”

“A lot of them did struggle with the hand-cut tenons because they were never asked to do that,” Gilchrist noted. “While contestants are always asked to bring a hand saw and chisels, most of them never really seem to use them much and it showed.”

THE TOP: The core material of the cabinet’s top had a trapezoid shape. The contestants had to create the trapezoid core and then cut solid wood edges to apply at each end to create a rectangular top.

“We had a fixture for them to cut the trapezoid core,” Gilchrist continued. “While it was designed to be cut with the face down, many cut it with the face up. As a result, there were a lot of backward tops with the trapezoid going the wrong way.”

THE SHELVING: “The half-lap joinery on the shelving puzzled some of them,” Gilchrist said. “We noted on the drawings that it was a half lap and that both sides were to be dadoed. The leg was 7/8-inch thick and the shelf was ¾-inch thick. The dado was set up for the ¾-inch thickness of the plywood but they had to remember to measure to the right point of the leg and then make a second pass in order to get the right thickness on where the shelf would saddle over the leg. Some wanted to go the easy route and just dado one side. Some couldn’t understand why they had to dado both sides. But that’s how you get a better joint.”

Upping the Ante
Gilchrist heads a committee made up of woodworking professionals and instructors from around the country. Most of them have ties to the Architectural Woodwork Institute and all are involved with their respective state’s SkillsUSA competitions leading up to the national championships.

Members of the 2023 SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking Technical Committee included:
Kent Gilchrist, Fremont Interiors, SkillsUSA technical chair/AWI SkillsUSA Committee member
Kristine Cox, Rowland Woodworking, AWI SkillsUSA Committee chair
Joe Davis, Dale Jackson Career Center, SkillsUSA Education Committee chair
Tony Aubin, Aubin Woodworking, AWI SkillsUSA Committee member
Ryan Flanagan, Riverside Architectural Millwork, AWI SkillsUSA Committee member
John Volpe, Volpe Millwork, AWI SkillsUSA Committee member

“One of the committee’s goals has been to make the national competition more difficult to match the expectations that we have in the industry.” Gilchrist said. “As we have built up the level of challenges for the national SkillsUSA proejct, we have seen that the advisors at the state level have upped their game dramatically.

“For instance. when I took over the Indiana contest, it was a written test for cabinetmaking. They didn’t build anything. The students took a written test and the winner went to nationals. They were at a loss. Indiana typically placed middle to the lower end of the group at nationals. Since we added a skills competition in Indiana, we had one student place second last year in high school and this year an Indiana student won gold in postsecondary. It was the first time we ever had a postsecondary competitor from Indiana,” Gilchrist said.

In addition to ratcheting up the SkillsUSA project to make it more challenging, the committee also expanded the orientation day before the competition to include more presentations about the woodworking industry including an overview of career opportunities and new technologies. Woodworking instructors who attended SkillsUSA met separately to learn about the WCA skill standards and credentialing system, AWI scholarship opportunities for their students, and to engage in an open forum with their peers.

Industry Support
The following companies provided services, equipment, and products for the SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking contest.
A1 Face Veneer
American Packaging
Bell Cabinetry & Design
Blum
Boyce Highlands
DeWalt Power Tools
Flexible Materials
Grizzly Industrial
Hafele
Irwin Industrial Tools
Lamello/Colonial Saw
Richelieu
Rockler Woodworking
Rugby Architectural Building Products
Sawstop
SCM North America
Shaper Tools
Widgetco
Woodwork Career Alliance of North America

Note: WCA INDustry Sponsors are bold faced.