kitchen cabinetry without too much plywood ?
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Hello everybody,
my mid-term plan is to construct a new kitchen in my house. I’ve seen a lot of videos of people doing the kitchen cabinets out of the plywood, by using pocket holes, table saws and other equipment used for plywood machining. Point is, I don’t have that and frankly, I don’t want too much to work with plywood. I want to do with plywood only ordinary operations like ‘insert shop-sized plywood into a frame’.
So, how to build the kitchen cabinets by avoiding stitching the plywood together? Do i need to do like a ‘common’ frame for the entire kitchen, make slots in the frame, and use those as guide to insert the pre-cut plywood sheets?
i know that this is pretty non-standard what I ask, but just working with plywood is not … say … style of the work i would appreciate.
any ideas welcomed
thanksdavid
Hello David,
For whatever they might be worth, here are a few photos and comments on kitchen cabinets I’ve made for our croft, using tenoned and mortised frames as sub-assemblies, and then gluing them together into cabinets. The panels are birch plywood and the frames Scottish Pine (Pinus Sylvestris). All painted white.
The front mortices and tenons presented the only challenges. I have since changed to sliding [non-tapered) dovetails-
Sven-Olof Jansson
London, UK; Boston, MANice. Exactly the solution I’m looking for. I guess combination of materials does not harm, right? I’d like to use oak for everything what is visible, and some cheaper wood (like beech) for invisible parts. Indeed oak is quite expensive wood (here in Switzerland sold 2700CHF/m^3 compared to beech of 1400CHF/m^3, walnut is sold for 5000CHF/m^3)
So the goal is to make frame construction with slots, put ply as a filler into invisible places and ‘door-like’ panels into visible parts, right?
Thanks and happy for whatever I can provide.
It’s fortunate that I prefer light woods, because however delightful North American Black Walnut is to work with, it’s 6 900 CHF/m³ here; a price that relegates it to presents for my better half who really fancies dark wood.
Mixing different types of wood has not presented any problems for me. On a more relevant level: “The Chessboard project” shows quite clearly I think that mixing is perfectly OK.
Beach (North American, that is, [Fagus Grandifolia]) is quite the favourite. I like it’s calm homogenous texture and the superb smoothness that hand tools brings to it, but it is a bit hard to work. For a kitchen cupboard carcass birch is perhaps an alternative to consider. As long as one is going along the grain, it planes very well without too much effort, and as for mortising and tenoning, birch, in my very humble, is second only to basswood.
There should be plywood with oak veneered surfaces, which I imagine should blend well with oak doors, giving a very nice front.
Add a couple photos on mixing woods for drawers and the virtues of walnut.
Sven-Olof Jansson
London, UK; Boston, MA
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