Go the chink part of town if your city has one and find a kitchen supply store. They'll have imports. You'll find they're about as real and well-made as any other chink-made thing. They're actually made of cardboard.
>pre-veneered MDF
sounds fine for the sides and other flat surfaces if you take pains to hide the edges, but won't it look like shit when you make a door like OP's pic, or do you buy real wood for that.
>make a door
That's a five piece door, so the real wood around the sides will cover the edge. The face frame is also real wood. The carcass however is particle board held together with plastic clips. They put their money in the front where you'll see it when installed. Still recommend MDF because it'll stay flat as a door, your panel gaps stay consistent, and it feels nice and substantial when opening and closing. Slab / euro style or 5-piece.
scrap/pallet scores would be the cheapest simple material cost I imagine, but without a planer and a good clamping setup I'd just go with MDF or plywood.
MDF is paint grade. It's also stable. A lot of not cheap cabinets are fine with mdf parts because they get a thick enough candy shell anyway.
What's the best wood to build a cabinet with?
Solid hardwood doors and faceframes. Veneer over ply for the carcass.
The hardware is just as important to the overall feel and operation of your cabs. Antique cabs were just wood drawers rubbing against wood or a single wheel on a nail under the drawer. Now Blum for example gives you smooth operating soft close and both glides and hinges adjust in 3 directions. That's important to make the entire kitchen uniform.
That striping looks quartersawn. The doors and drawers look recessed too. That's a style that's more involved than standard framed and frameless cabs. Basically you're looking at something much more expensive than it should be simply because it has to be custom made.
It is indeed QSWO. I was going to custom build them as a project anyway so besides the premium raw wood the cost OOP will be basically the same.
Plus we're a tall family so I want the counters to be 2" taller than standard so a manlet doesn't buy the house when I'm dead.
no cabinets, do an open commercial style kitchen with shelves and hanging pots and shit
>loose BDSM voyeur pots and pans
You're a decade late on that trend
8 months ago
Anonymous
i bet nobody even wants to look at your pots and pans
8 months ago
Anonymous
False. I have nice pans >that are currently hanging all bawdtily.
Cabinets soon
8 months ago
Anonymous
Cabinets suck ngl I'd much rather have an Adam Savage style "first order retrievability" in a kitchen. Cabinets are depressing and creaky; stainless steel is based
8 months ago
Anonymous
(Good) Cabinets are beautiful though. I might remove a cabinet and replace with some shelves but I have a lot of windows in my kitchen so only have 4 uppers as is.
https://i.imgur.com/fK5tUWb.jpg
Who is she, anon?
An extremely pregnant family member. Well technically the first day not pregnant but you get the idea.
I was thinking something like this with the slab top drawer and shaker bottoms.
Not these handles but Blum soft close hinges etc.
im a pm at a small-ish cab company (15 employees but we do 3mil in work annually) and we use hettich for our hardware instead of blum. mostly because it's cheaper, but they have a lot better adjustment built into their hardware.
if we have to we'll go blum but thats always basically the last option
MDF is 1000 times better than particle board. And you can buy pre-veneered MDF for about $60. It'll take stain and finish and hold a screw. Highly recommend.
sounds fine for the sides and other flat surfaces if you take pains to hide the edges, but won't it look like shit when you make a door like OP's pic, or do you buy real wood for that.
exactly. what's the best material with which to manufacture such a thing? MDF apparently. though I wonder if plastic extrusion is possible
cabinets can cost $1500 or $0 on craigslist
Anything you can get for free. Tons of wood on CL and FB Marketplace for free or really cheap.
Past that, there is no "best/cheapest material" for building cabinets with. It all depends on design, how you construct them and what kind of materials you have access to.
I personally like using solid wood. Plywood has its place. MDF and particle board, I do not like them. If I were building cabinets, I would use a combination of solid wood and plywood. I like frameless style cabinets and would probably go 3/4" thick all the way around with something thinner for drawers. If you need something to look good and just cover an expanse, I think a good solution would be 1/8" hardwood glued to real, tempered masonite. That would probably be the cheapest thing that looks best and is most stable if you can get the 1/8" hardwood. You can also use peel and stick real wood veneer to cover just about any material with wood grain, but the veneer can be pricey.
>plywood. I like frameless style
Sounds great until your client doesn't want to pay because the door has 2mm of warp over 34 inches and suddenly the panel gaps are asymmetric.
You cannot beat engineered sheet goods for flatness.
First of all, any general cabinet you buy, no matter the material, is not going to be perfect. It's going to be slightly warped and out of square. Especially the door. Even engineered materials. Secondly, a homeowner isn't gonna even notice unless you show them and even then, if you just install 3-way door hinges (I like Blum, they're nice) you can make up for that no problem. Thirdly, nobody was talking about building for a client. Fourth, if you're building a specific type of cabinet for a specific person then you should do the things you need to do in order to build it properly so they are happy, all of which are completely irrelevant to this discussion.
I've built $12,000 baltic birch cabinets for well to do middle-aged women and these neurotic divorcees absolutely look for every little thing to b***h about. I understand that's a little different from "cheapest material" so go with MDF. Even baltic birch and solid wood move. $20 Blum hinges can't help you when the edge of the hinge side of the door is 2 degrees off from the handle side of the door, and you also have push-to-open, and 6 frameless doors in a row to line up perfectly with nothing to visually break the lines up to hide the flaws.
Yes, plywood and solid wood move. If you understand the mechanics, you can move them back. Wood fibers will expand and contract due to heat and moisture. Wood grain and knots will influence this process and broken fibers ruin it.
Proper application of moisture, heat, airflow and time will warp or unwarp wood. For some situations clamping can also help. For instance, a typical warp in a board will be a bow, where one side of the board's fibers became too dry in relation to the other side. By applying moisture, heat and time to the convex side, the board can begin to straighten back out. A practical application of this is putting a damp rag on a board and letting it sit in the sun. This was common knowledge many years ago.
If what you're saying is true, that the build was solid and it was the wood door that warped, then you could have warped it back. I bet there was more going on. Was the door made entirely of plywood? If so, then you can expect it to warp. Proper door construction requires multiple pieces of wood joined together in a way that allows the construction of the door to resist and even nullify the movement of the wood fibers by pitting them against each other. Laminated or veneered particle board or MDF are the only materials that can get away with a one-piece door construction, but they are no good when subjected to moisture. Did you check your wood's moisture levels before you began the build? Did you build the set of cabinets backwards, as in, with those reveals in mind? It honestly doesn't surprise me at all that your construction was slightly off, even for $12,000. There are so many variables involved in making a series of cabinets line up perfectly that it would take a great degree of planning and analysis to pull it off, of which most people are incapable. The better way to go is to build the cabinets to allow for a margin of error and use preparation, planning and design to give you ways to manipulate reveal.
2x4's are by far the cheapest source of wood that you can buy at a retail store for anything thicker than a pencil scribe. Not even a contest, no question at all. You have to reduce the sheet thickness to about 1/8" before anything like plywood or masonite can compete with 2x4's. Issues with 2x4's are you've got to dry them out and you need to mill them up and laminate them together yourself. Furring strips are the cheapest source of readily available solid wood 1 by material in board dimensions, but sheet stock competes with them on price point.
cardboard.
excellent post, anon. keeping the board alive.
based
>Pic rel
The internet has fricking rotted my brain, I see it everywhere now.
Sus
sus
plastic? plywood?
s Alibaba a scam?
>unfinished Beech
That's not cheap. And you have to finish it or it won't last.
how is alibaba so much cheaper than anything I can find in big box stores
Go the chink part of town if your city has one and find a kitchen supply store. They'll have imports. You'll find they're about as real and well-made as any other chink-made thing. They're actually made of cardboard.
>make a door
That's a five piece door, so the real wood around the sides will cover the edge. The face frame is also real wood. The carcass however is particle board held together with plastic clips. They put their money in the front where you'll see it when installed. Still recommend MDF because it'll stay flat as a door, your panel gaps stay consistent, and it feels nice and substantial when opening and closing. Slab / euro style or 5-piece.
scrap/pallet scores would be the cheapest simple material cost I imagine, but without a planer and a good clamping setup I'd just go with MDF or plywood.
MDF? glad I asked
MDF is paint grade. It's also stable. A lot of not cheap cabinets are fine with mdf parts because they get a thick enough candy shell anyway.
Solid hardwood doors and faceframes. Veneer over ply for the carcass.
The hardware is just as important to the overall feel and operation of your cabs. Antique cabs were just wood drawers rubbing against wood or a single wheel on a nail under the drawer. Now Blum for example gives you smooth operating soft close and both glides and hinges adjust in 3 directions. That's important to make the entire kitchen uniform.
I was thinking something like this with the slab top drawer and shaker bottoms.
Not these handles but Blum soft close hinges etc.
That striping looks quartersawn. The doors and drawers look recessed too. That's a style that's more involved than standard framed and frameless cabs. Basically you're looking at something much more expensive than it should be simply because it has to be custom made.
It is indeed QSWO. I was going to custom build them as a project anyway so besides the premium raw wood the cost OOP will be basically the same.
Plus we're a tall family so I want the counters to be 2" taller than standard so a manlet doesn't buy the house when I'm dead.
>loose BDSM voyeur pots and pans
You're a decade late on that trend
i bet nobody even wants to look at your pots and pans
False. I have nice pans
>that are currently hanging all bawdtily.
Cabinets soon
Cabinets suck ngl I'd much rather have an Adam Savage style "first order retrievability" in a kitchen. Cabinets are depressing and creaky; stainless steel is based
(Good) Cabinets are beautiful though. I might remove a cabinet and replace with some shelves but I have a lot of windows in my kitchen so only have 4 uppers as is.
An extremely pregnant family member. Well technically the first day not pregnant but you get the idea.
Who is she, anon?
im a pm at a small-ish cab company (15 employees but we do 3mil in work annually) and we use hettich for our hardware instead of blum. mostly because it's cheaper, but they have a lot better adjustment built into their hardware.
if we have to we'll go blum but thats always basically the last option
can you get sheets of laminate or particle board that are reasonable? doesn't need to be oak.
has anyone tried to order custom manufacturing from Alibaba?
MDF is 1000 times better than particle board. And you can buy pre-veneered MDF for about $60. It'll take stain and finish and hold a screw. Highly recommend.
>pre-veneered MDF
sounds fine for the sides and other flat surfaces if you take pains to hide the edges, but won't it look like shit when you make a door like OP's pic, or do you buy real wood for that.
What's the best wood to build a cabinet with?
plywood and 2x4
italian maple
If temperature is of no concern, ice. Otherwise rammed eart/dirt. Or waste material.
I want to make one of these
I've seen one of these made from a TV cabinet. Like the old ones that held crts.
exactly. what's the best material with which to manufacture such a thing? MDF apparently. though I wonder if plastic extrusion is possible
cabinets can cost $1500 or $0 on craigslist
So make one. You can literally build that from scrap material or $50 is you're in a hurry.
naturally stiffened cumrags, it's like ferrocement
why did you post a photo of my cabinets in the cheap cabinet thread
could probably make it out of mud and straw
hinges could be difficult, I suggest a plug/cover made in a similar fashion
What the Chinese make them out of, plastic or fibre board if feeling fancy (i work in a real wooden cabinet shop)
no cabinets, do an open commercial style kitchen with shelves and hanging pots and shit
Anything you can get for free. Tons of wood on CL and FB Marketplace for free or really cheap.
Past that, there is no "best/cheapest material" for building cabinets with. It all depends on design, how you construct them and what kind of materials you have access to.
I personally like using solid wood. Plywood has its place. MDF and particle board, I do not like them. If I were building cabinets, I would use a combination of solid wood and plywood. I like frameless style cabinets and would probably go 3/4" thick all the way around with something thinner for drawers. If you need something to look good and just cover an expanse, I think a good solution would be 1/8" hardwood glued to real, tempered masonite. That would probably be the cheapest thing that looks best and is most stable if you can get the 1/8" hardwood. You can also use peel and stick real wood veneer to cover just about any material with wood grain, but the veneer can be pricey.
>plywood. I like frameless style
Sounds great until your client doesn't want to pay because the door has 2mm of warp over 34 inches and suddenly the panel gaps are asymmetric.
You cannot beat engineered sheet goods for flatness.
Got your head stuck up own ass, anon.
First of all, any general cabinet you buy, no matter the material, is not going to be perfect. It's going to be slightly warped and out of square. Especially the door. Even engineered materials. Secondly, a homeowner isn't gonna even notice unless you show them and even then, if you just install 3-way door hinges (I like Blum, they're nice) you can make up for that no problem. Thirdly, nobody was talking about building for a client. Fourth, if you're building a specific type of cabinet for a specific person then you should do the things you need to do in order to build it properly so they are happy, all of which are completely irrelevant to this discussion.
I've built $12,000 baltic birch cabinets for well to do middle-aged women and these neurotic divorcees absolutely look for every little thing to b***h about. I understand that's a little different from "cheapest material" so go with MDF. Even baltic birch and solid wood move. $20 Blum hinges can't help you when the edge of the hinge side of the door is 2 degrees off from the handle side of the door, and you also have push-to-open, and 6 frameless doors in a row to line up perfectly with nothing to visually break the lines up to hide the flaws.
Yes, plywood and solid wood move. If you understand the mechanics, you can move them back. Wood fibers will expand and contract due to heat and moisture. Wood grain and knots will influence this process and broken fibers ruin it.
Proper application of moisture, heat, airflow and time will warp or unwarp wood. For some situations clamping can also help. For instance, a typical warp in a board will be a bow, where one side of the board's fibers became too dry in relation to the other side. By applying moisture, heat and time to the convex side, the board can begin to straighten back out. A practical application of this is putting a damp rag on a board and letting it sit in the sun. This was common knowledge many years ago.
If what you're saying is true, that the build was solid and it was the wood door that warped, then you could have warped it back. I bet there was more going on. Was the door made entirely of plywood? If so, then you can expect it to warp. Proper door construction requires multiple pieces of wood joined together in a way that allows the construction of the door to resist and even nullify the movement of the wood fibers by pitting them against each other. Laminated or veneered particle board or MDF are the only materials that can get away with a one-piece door construction, but they are no good when subjected to moisture. Did you check your wood's moisture levels before you began the build? Did you build the set of cabinets backwards, as in, with those reveals in mind? It honestly doesn't surprise me at all that your construction was slightly off, even for $12,000. There are so many variables involved in making a series of cabinets line up perfectly that it would take a great degree of planning and analysis to pull it off, of which most people are incapable. The better way to go is to build the cabinets to allow for a margin of error and use preparation, planning and design to give you ways to manipulate reveal.
2x4's are by far the cheapest source of wood that you can buy at a retail store for anything thicker than a pencil scribe. Not even a contest, no question at all. You have to reduce the sheet thickness to about 1/8" before anything like plywood or masonite can compete with 2x4's. Issues with 2x4's are you've got to dry them out and you need to mill them up and laminate them together yourself. Furring strips are the cheapest source of readily available solid wood 1 by material in board dimensions, but sheet stock competes with them on price point.
Ice
Stolen or found materials. Obviously.
Scrapwood from the dump.