Melamine Kitchen cabinets with wall ovens

[gerford carter]

I'm building my kitchen cabinets and I'm laying out the wall oven cabinet. The GE installation guide says "adjoining cabinets must be able to withstand 194 degrees".
I'm building the cabinets out of melamine and I can't see if the melamine is approved for wall oven cabinets. I would assume it is, but does anybody know? Have you built kitchen cabinets for wall ovens with melamine?
This is the first wall oven cabinet I've made.
I'm putting in a 3 stack unit with a warming drawer, wall oven and the Advantium 220 volt speed cooker. The brochure says to make sure its well supported and to use a minimum of 3/8 inch plywood. If plywood is acceptable, I would also assume melamine is acceptable.
Thanks for any advice.

[Dave Avery]

Gerford,


We have Thermador double ovens in Ikea (gasp melamine cabinets..... the faces of which I someday hope to replace with some highly figured veneer panels and complementary frames. That said, the cabinets have taken high heat from the ovens for 18 months with no ill effect (affect?). From my limited sample size, I'd GUESS that you're fine. Best of luck. Dave.

[Greg Cole]

Gerford,
The only kitchen cab's I've seen have an issue being near an oven are the thermofoil laminate ones.....
I'd suspect you're safe, but ya might want to contact the manufacturer of the melamine to make sure it's rated for that temperature range.

Greg

[gerford carter]

I looked on the Material Safety Data Sheet and all it says is that it has a Flash point higher than 200 degrees and a melting point of 482 degrees. I have to assume that melamine is used in all sorts of kitchen cabinets and a wall oven cabinet would be OK. It's just when I read about dimensions on the cut sheet from GE it mentioned the temperature and it raised a question whether melamine meets the standards.
Anybody build wall oven cabinets with melamine?
Any reason not to?
I'm off to the shop this morning to start building.

[David DeCristoforo]

I am loath to confess, I have built many cabinets with melamine interiors. I finally got sick of working with the stuff and refused to use it anymore. However, I built a great many oven cabinets out of melamine and never had any issues. Since ovens are, more often than not, built into a "floor to ceiling" cabinet, I always had at least a drawer under the ovens and a storage cabinet above. It was my practice with all cabinets of this type to leave the oven section open on the back and to make the storage cabinet above the ovens a few inches shallower than the rest of the cabinet so that a "chase" was created behind the oven(s) to allow any excess heat to escape.

Depending on how you build the cabinet, you may have very little side clearance between the oven and the cabinet sides (as would be the case with a "frameless" design) or you may have a inch or so (with a "face frame style" cabinet). But, with the oven(s) "vented" as described above, I never had any issues either way.

YM

[Jeffrey Makiel]

Commercially made cabinet manufacturers like KraftMaid, Medallion, Wood Mode, etc., sell heat shields for oven cabinets and they offer cabinet carcasses of melamine as well as plywood. However, I believe they are mostly to protect the cabinets from self-cleaning ovens which use heat to clean themselves.

-Jeff

[Ben Grunow]

Set tho old oven for 200 and bake a piece for a while (make sure to watch it). That should prove it for you.