It's been four or five years since I have had a shop and worked with birch ply. Now I have a new 30x50 shop (discussed in another thread) and I am in the middle of building cabinets/drawers/bookcase for the house.

At the old shop in Central Florida, I had a local mom/pop lumberyard where I bought all of my wood from and always got really nice birch plywood, or they would order whatever I wanted.

I realize crappy plywood has been the subject of other threads, but my knickers are in such a twist I need an outlet This post is not a rant about buying foreign goods per say, it is a report about working with simply awful plywood.

It was quite a surprise for me (living under a rock for a few years) to see the DIY big boxes carrying Chinese "cabinet" plywood. I bought a few sheets for building workshop projects and I was amazed at how thin the veneer was, wavy, voids, etc, etc (all the problems previously reported.) I was also picking tiny splinters out of my hands literally all of the time after handling the wood after a cut.

Back to the house projects...

I found a hardwood supplier and made the 70 mile trip (we're out in the boonies) a couple of weeks ago and bought several sheets of Russian 1/2" Baltic birch for drawers, and several sheets of domestic 3/4" birch plywood (~$70/sheet) for the bookcase. The domestic ply was made in Oregon (I think) and is just beautiful - clear, straight, no apparent voids, thick veneer. The Baltic birch is also quite nice - I build nine drawers with it and had no issues.

Couldn't bear the thought about building the cabinet carcass out of such beautiful and expensive domestic ply since the carcass will be essentially out of sight unless a drawer is opened. So I bought more Chinese ply for the carcass and oh my gosh - what a nightmare working with it. I made dadoes and rabbits for the joints and I had problems with the wood breaking when trying to assemble the sides, and the thickness was different, so my boxes are off slightly from one another. When I designed the drawers, I had to make them about 1/16" narrower than I wanted due to one box being off dimension, so I might need to put a washer here and there when mounting the drawer slides. I will also have to use the "carpenter's friend" (wood putty) where the veneer splintered. Sigh....

This was so problematic, I have decided to only use the Chinese ply for workshop projects.