Building Frameless Plywood Cabinets

Frameless cabinets don t always need to be finished.

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. If you want your new cabinet project to be as easy as possible consider building frameless cabinets. 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. Begin with the right cabinet dimensions.

Because of its simplicity a wall cabinet is ideal for demonstrating the key benefit of frameless 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. The 3 4 plywood case eliminates panel jointing planing and glue ups. The sample base and wall cabinets shown below have these features to make building them as simple as possible.

Each cabinet carcass will have two sides made from 3 4 plywood. It is made of 3 4 plywood throughout including a full back. Frameless cabinet construction favors a cabinet box that uses a thicker stiffer plywood to make up for the lack. The top consists of 2 4 stretchers.

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. That design really fits well in the modern european style like i was going for. If you use melamine for your boxes drawers and doors you can avoid the finishing process completely and move directly from construction to installation. That being said the total depth of my base cabinets including the door was about 24 deep and upper cabinets was about 13.

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. I built these cabinets frameless with full overlay doors to avoid having to use anything except plywood to build them. Overlaps on the sides let you fine tune the cabinet width during installation. The frameless cabinet design i find easiest to build install and provides exceptional strength is the one pictured right.