When laying out the available space, I did not take into account that the face frame does not necessarily center itself over each vertical case side. In some cases, like in the middle where two cases butt up against each other, the face frame is centered perfectly over the side case. But when the case is an end case in the run, the face frame is aligned to the edge of the case and not centered. So when I place the frame on the cases, and started measuring the opennings I realized that I was totally hosed. Almost every case had a different openning width and almost every door in the lower case was a different size. Okay not quite there was some obviously pairing on of sizes and some symmetry between one side and the other.
Okay, having realized that 5 evenings of work in SketchUp was pretty much hosed, I took a step back. Basically in order to design it correctly I had to start with the face frame and layout the face frame with equa-distant spacing on the various opennings. With that complete, it was a simple process of moving the case sides and lower case partitions to their correct locations - either centered or aligned with the edge of the face frame as needed.
The end result was nice even opennings but with the face frame removed the sizes of the cases went from equal widths to varied widths. This means that a shelf from one of the middle cases cannot be used in the adjacent case. Each case will have its own set of shelves that are unique to it. Its a trade off - nice visually pleasing cases that look uniform in their opennings. Or uniformly sized cases that all have different sized opennings. I went for the visual layout. The following 3 images give a feel for what the final case will look like.
The following images show the dimesions of the case with and without face frame. It was a great learning experience discovering this in SketchUp vs. after cutting all the material . That would have been disastrous.
