Building Frameless Plywood Cabinets

I built these cabinets frameless with full overlay doors to avoid having to use anything except plywood to build them.

Building frameless plywood cabinets.

Building simple frameless kitchen cabinets with pocket screws euro style i m back in the shop of bng dayton between cabin trips i use some down time to b. The 3 4 plywood case eliminates panel jointing planing and glue ups. As the trend toward european style frameless cabinets continues to grow many cabinet builders are discovering that the composite plywood they ve been using to build framed cabinets isn t quite doing the job as well as it should. That design really fits well in the modern european style like i was going for.

Building plywood upper kitchen cabinets even spectacular upper kitchen cabinets can be made simply with only a few pieces of hardware and some relatively straightforward construction. If you are building cabinets for a kitchen all your base cabinet side will be the exact same size and all your wall cabinet sides will be the exact same. Face frames cover plywood edges. The sample base and wall cabinets shown below have these features to make building them as simple as possible.

Because of its simplicity a wall cabinet is ideal for demonstrating the key benefit of frameless construction. Overlaps on the sides let you fine tune the cabinet width during installation. If you want your new cabinet project to be as easy as possible consider building frameless cabinets. The top consists of 2 4 stretchers.

Begin with the right cabinet dimensions. While building frameless cabinets isn t very difficult it is important that the cuts are accurate and the pieces as well as the assembly is square. Frameless cabinet construction favors a cabinet box that uses a thicker stiffer plywood to make up for the lack. Before you go crazy in your kitchen with a sledgehammer and order a large pile of plywood try to build one small cabinet to make sure you re happy with your results.

The frameless cabinet design i find easiest to build install and provides exceptional strength is the one pictured right. If you use melamine for your boxes drawers and doors you can avoid the finishing process completely and move directly from construction to installation. These parts vary slightly based on whether you are doing a face frame cabinet or frameless cabinet. Frameless cabinets don t always need to be finished.