Replies

1. 
   PSeverin | May 27, 2011 07:11pm | #1

   And a mid stile too?

    I've made most of my cabinets with 1/4" solid wood panels, but nothing quite so wide as you are talking about.  I noticed on an old wood cabinet that they made use of an intermediate center stile, say 1 1/2" across that made each of the panels half the width and thus controlled some of the problem you may have.  It works.  

    Perhaps I'm not sensitive to maple grain but I would think the plain slice maple plywood would look a lot like the hardwood solid panels unless you've got a bunch of very special boards..  At one point I even took two layers of 1/4" plywood from a big box store and placed them back to back as a panel.  It was a little less than 3/8" thick as I remember it.  I couldn't find plywood with two good faces.  Still can't.  Trying to find double sided quarter sawn white oak plywood that nobody had is what led me to resawing 3/4" material on a table saw and gluing it together into a panel slightly thicker than 1/4".   

   Peter

2. 
   RalphBarker | May 28, 2011 04:43pm | #2

   stylin' stiles

   I'd consider making the center stile slightly more narrow than the outside ones - 1 1/2", perhaps. You might whip up SketchUp drawings of both styles, and see which you and your wife prefer. In doing so, I'd suggest doing a copy/paste of several cabinets next to each other, to get a better sense of what the repeat will look like.