Building Frameless Plywood Cabinets

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.

Building frameless plywood cabinets.

Frameless cabinets don t always need to be finished. Each cabinet carcass will have two sides made from 3 4 plywood. 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.

The top consists of 2 4 stretchers. 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. Frameless cabinet construction favors a cabinet box that uses a thicker stiffer plywood to make up for the lack. I built these cabinets frameless with full overlay doors to avoid having to use anything except plywood to build them.

Begin with the right cabinet dimensions. The frameless cabinet design i find easiest to build install and provides exceptional strength is the one pictured right. It is made of 3 4 plywood throughout including a full back. 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. These parts vary slightly based on whether you are doing a face frame cabinet or frameless cabinet. Because of its simplicity a wall cabinet is ideal for demonstrating the key benefit of frameless construction. If you want your new cabinet project to be as easy as possible consider building frameless cabinets.

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. The sample base and wall cabinets shown below have these features to make building them as simple as possible. 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. Face frames cover plywood edges.