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.

Begin with the right cabinet dimensions. If you use melamine for your boxes drawers and doors you can avoid the finishing process completely and move directly from construction to installation. Because of its simplicity a wall cabinet is ideal for demonstrating the key benefit of frameless construction. The top consists of 2 4 stretchers.

It is made of 3 4 plywood throughout including a full back. The frameless cabinet design i find easiest to build install and provides exceptional strength is the one pictured right. The 3 4 plywood case eliminates panel jointing planing and glue ups. 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.

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. 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. Face frames cover plywood edges. Overlaps on the sides let you fine tune the cabinet width during 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 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. Each cabinet carcass will have two sides made from 3 4 plywood. 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. That design really fits well in the modern european style like i was going for. The sample base and wall cabinets shown below have these features to make building them as simple as possible. These parts vary slightly based on whether you are doing a face frame cabinet or frameless cabinet.