Hello All, I am planning a gut renovation of my kitchen. For the cabinets I am considering bamboo plywood. My thought is to have the surface look like a sheet of material has been hung and the openings cut out, using the cutouts as inset doors. The overview should look like a flat continuous grain panel.
Have any of you ever tried this? I’m just brainstorming possible approaches to my build. Off the top of my head I’m thinking tracksaw plunge cuts.
Replies
It's doable, but you will have to use great care to get straight, smooth, and square cut-outs with a narrow kerf. Some kind of cutting guide will likely be necessary. You should probably have an alternate plan to apply some thin trim on the doors or frame or both to compensate for wider cuts if needed. This will not only narrow the gaps but cover the exposed plies.
Maybe try finding someone who can lasercut it? Bamboo plywood is extremely tough.....
It might be something you really like, but always consider your home resale value. It's not like a piece of furniture that you can easily take with you. If you will be selling the home anytime soon, I'd consider going with a more common cabinet style.
I once toured an open house with kitchen cabinet doors that were each covered with a veneer of a different species of wood. The realtor met me at the door and immediately commented that the kitchen doors could be changed out and that I should not let that detract too much from the overall house (as if the half dozen or so fully-dressed manikins in the bedrooms weren't off-putting enough....I imagine the realtor suggested storing them elsewhere to the homeowners, but it likely fell on deaf ears).
I’ve got nothing useful to suggest re: procedure, etc., but I’d just like to say I really like the design idea you came up with. I’d love to see some photos when done. (And maybe a few showing the process and progress?)
Best of luck with it.
As a professional kitchen designer /remodeler I will say what you propose, while theoretically possible is not feasible in the real world unless you have access to large CNC machine that can precisely cut an 1/8" slot, even then your corners would be unnaturally radiused slightly.
Years ago cheap low end cabinets often did just what you proposed. They would take laminate covered sheets of particle board cut out the door openings then apply a cheap outside corner molding to the cut out and call it the door. Really low end look.
You would be much better served by simply building frameless cases and doing a full overlay door. You would end up with a very classy modern look kitchen. Inset doors are usually used to achieve the farmhouse look and would be at odds with the bamboo in my opinion.
I'm going to second the frame less cabinets with full overlay doors.
Thanks to all for the input, if anyone's done something like what I've described I'd love to hear from you.
Up front I will agree frameless with 1/8" will be a simple way to achieve that look.
However if you want to be a masochist, and there is nothing wrong with that. This would be my approach:
Cut a panel the width and length of the finished face frame plus the combined widths of the kerfs. Then rip and crosscut as shown in the drawings. When the face frame is constructed from the resulting parts you will be left with openings the same dimensions as the doors/drawer faces, which can be slightly trimmed to fit (the stiles will need to be trimmed in length as well). This may give you the continuity you are looking for.
I have not done this or thought it through, so just a concept. Maybe it will help.
Thanks 27B_6, but there is no face frame... The "face frame" will be a solid sheet of stock with no seams. Picture the drawers and doors as windows cut out of a sheet. Your masochist point is well taken!
I am not sure you see what 27B_6 means here...
The difficulty you will have is getting perfect corners. Just no way to perform that with any type of circular saw.
What 27B_6 is saying is make the cutouts as he shows and then glue the frame pieces back together without the door pieces and it WILL look like it is out of a single sheet of plywood - including grain will be vertical on your horizontal pieces. AND you will have perfectly square corners to doors and frame pieces.
If this isn't what you want, you might consider uploading a drawing so we can see exactly what you mean.
Thanks RAL3Wood. That is exactly what I was proposing.
I understand both his suggestion AND what the difficulties will be. That's why I was hoping to leverage the experience of others like ROB_SS. I am aware that there are other options, but my intent is to cut out the doors as I described in my OP.
I did it once, trying to save money and time on a built-in and it really did not work well.
Even allowing for my crap technique with a poor quality circular saw, the look was just not what I had hoped for. The gap just totally destroyed the image of grain continuity and I was very disappointed with the outcome. The edges were not perfect and the slightest dig showed.
I ended up painting the cupboard and restoring the edges with bog and even then I could see it laughing at me.
Even so, I think that if you have wood with a good grain pattern for it, this might work. A laser is the best bet, though few are big enough to cut a full sheet.
If I were going to try this now, I would do plunge cuts. I have a battery operated saw with a very narrow blade (IRO 1/16" - I've not measured it) and I think that might do the job. I'd be afraid of making a mistake though - those cuts are really difficult to get right - the slightest twist or kick from the saw and it's all over - the whole piece is junk. You will also be hard-pressed to get the back end of the cut exactly right - you will almost certainly have to turn the saw round and if you are not spot on, it will show - even 1-2/1000" off line and the piece is not going to look right.
Also, because any variance is so visible, any attempt to smooth a rough edge has to be very light and delicate.
I think this can be done - you are way more experienced than I am and I was pretty green when I made my stuff-up after all. I suspect that you will throw a lot of tools whilst doing it though.
On the value thing - sure, quirky is never good when selling a house, but who's house is it? Do you want to live in a house that is yours, or one you are decorating for the next people to live in it? Do your thing and enjoy it. You live only once, after all.
Hi Rob, thanks for your insight. How did you fasten the face sheet to the boxes? I should be fine on the plunge cuts...Festool tracksaw will earn its keep there. Also, what style of hinges did you use?
Whomever gets this place may want to rip out all of my built-ins and details, and that'll be their choice to make, but I kinda doubt it.
"Resale value" is why every kitchen looks more or less the same and everyone has a bathtub they never fill. My home, my choices, my day-to-day happiness.
I took out my tub when I renovated my bathroom, and put in a shower with no curb. A whole bunch of people told me I'd hurt the resale value without a tub. Since I figure they'll be carrying me out to the funeral home when I leave, I don't much care.
:-) Agree 100% with the choices.
I was miserable making the project. I used butt hinges from the diy store (they actually worked quite well) and pocket screws (no jig)
Back then I was far from a fine woodworker :-(
If I were doing the job today, I would use concealed Euro style hinges. I use them on all my shop cabinetry and they are awesome. You get a lot of control of the reveal in both directions. You can be as much as 3mm (sometimes more) off with your measurements and still get a perfect result. The adjustability means that you don't need a jig or anything, though it's worth making one, as even if you only intend to use them for one door, pretty soon you'll be using them all the time. They do give furniture a 'kitcheny' feel tho...
I'll start off by stating I have never done this and I am interested in seeing your result.
My concern with the track saw is the splintering I get on the offcut side of my saw. Maybe the Festool is better than my homemade jig, but I always get a fuzzy edge on the non-track side of a cut. With your plan, that would need to be a clean cut or the door would look rough. Maybe bamboo plywood doesn't splinter as bad, but that is my first concern.
Second, I can barely stand a 1/16th inch gap around a door. ~1/8 would be huge in my eye.
Another option for the cutout from a solid sheet plan would be to use a router with a 1/16" bit. You could make a square track, use spacers to arrange the inside and outside parts of the jig, and cut it with a guide bushing.
I would go with Blum hinges if you can make it work. With the clean look you are proposing, regular butt hinges would be too much. If there isn't a cabinet side behind the face frame, I would use Soss hidden barrel hinges.
You seem set on the "cutting it out from a single sheet" approach, but if I was to build this I would cut down the plywood using a table saw and reassemble to get nice square doors with small gaps then veneer everything to get a nice grain match. Craig Thibodeau demonstrates a technique in his book that looks nice for matching all the veneers across the edges.
FWIIW blue tape really reduces the tearout.
Not relevant to this project, but a table saw with a scribing blade is gold on plywood. My K3 takes a few minutes to get dialed in (you have to shim the scribing set to match the main blade and then shift it left and right over multiple test cuts). Something Sawstop should consider adding, given their market dominance.
Having the faces cut with a laser or cnc might not be prohibitively expensive. Save you the cost of a tracksaw. It might be worth looking into.
My first thought was that you could make your cut out out of a sheet then fit the doors out of another sheet. Some doors larger some doors smaller it might not waste that much material ,the cut out being used somewhere else, sides or whatever. The problem would be getting grain to match up and that could be tough , maybe nearly impossible. The type of plywood you choose and how you select your sheets could make that easier.
I have a thin kerf blade /Diablo that is about 1/16" wide and I doubt you could come up with anything that would give you a closer tolerance. So very careful cuts with your tracksaw and then hand cut the corners and dress with a chisel. I would go with the Blum hinges and experiment with the backset to be sure to maintain your even tolerance. The router idea would work, you'll smoke some of those very fine bits and you might have to make a new jig for each size opening. Radius corners? The router might give you cleaner edges than the circular saw. I have a router bushing that does inlays. I need to think awhile on how it could work using the same piece but there's no gap at all from two separate pieces. I'm thinking that it's just the same as the guide bushing idea. I mean your removing material so it's gone.. Your jigs for the router would have to be spot on ,dead flat and allowing for no wobble what so ever. The veneer idea is pretty good too. I'd probably biscuit join the faces onto the cabinet boxes.
My father's generation was adamant that you don't buy a home as an investment. Its a home! Thinking has changed and many people think of their house as an investment maybe more than they think of it as a home. But it's your house and you can have it the way you want it. Here where I live it's almost a sure thing that whoever buys a house will remodel even if it's just been remodeled to sell. I live by the beach but a house On the Beach just sold near here. It was offered at 6mil and sold for 9 and the new owners are tearing it down to build a house!
By the way - your using plywood, plywood has an outer face and an inner face and inbetween can be some pretty nasty stuff. The core is important because the edges will be exposed by your plan. Lumber core is not the lumber core of old. It can be just butt joints and possible gaps. MDF would be the most consistent but it's MDF.... I have used a apple core veneer plywood from Mt. STORM that was pretty nice through and through. It was pretty pricey You would see stripes but there were no voids or rough patches and might finish to a clean edge..
Looks like it's going to work just fine. Test board mostly by eye in pic below. Pantalones, the material is bamboo plywood, void free, think lumber core but all bamboo. Search "plyboo" to check it out.
New kitchen cabs are in the installation phase. It worked out beautifully, but it has been quite the project.
Old thread revived by spam
Haaaaa... Robes_pierre, I post that phrase trying to be helpful. I have a very minor role granted whereby I can delete spam posts here on the forum. I spend a little time each day weeding them out. The spam posts bring a thread back to page one, and when a years-old question is being answered in real time by members earnestly trying to help the OP I feel bad... so I post that to try and save everybody some wasted effort. I have no ill intent, and I apologize if it has been an irritant.
I DO ppreciate the comedy of your post, it was brilliant!
Cabinets look great!
Thanks John. They wound up too big to build in my shop and actually had to be boomed in through a window. I found a shop where I could work on the faces and had the boxes built out behind them. They weigh a frikkin ton!
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