Help with full overlay cabinetry

[Jerry Nettrour]

Hi, I have been taking on customers for about a year and recently have taken on some kitchen jobs. I only have experience mainly with furniture stuff with face frame construction. I met with a customer who hired me to do her kitchen but requet full overlay, showed me designer pics of what she is looking for. It looks to be frameless with 1/8" overlay. The family plans to put concrete counter tops on the cabinets.

My plan is to build in a hybrid mode. I still will use frames. I plan to fasten a bank of cabinets together. Make one large face frame for the bank. Where two cabinets come together there will be 1 1/2" thickness with the two 3/4" side panels screwed together. Those I plan to cover with a 1 5/8" vertical style. The end panel at the end of the bank I will just use a 3/4" or 7/8" vertical style. I do not plan on using any mid rails at all that are typically found between the top of the cabinet door and the bottom of the drawer face. The inner surface of my styles will be flush with the inside surface of the cabinet side panel. My top and bottom rails will probably be 1 1/2" wide which will give me plenty of width to use 2 pocket screws for joinery. I then plan to use 107 degree blum frameless hinges and kv 8455 soft close drawer guides.

I am sure it will work fine. I would go strictly frameless but have read a lot about it and it seems I am not set up to do frameless accurately. Frameless builders I beleive use melamine or MDF core. I use Birch plywood, not MDF or melamine. The problem with that is plywood is not always straight completely which I suppose can throw off drawers and doors. One reason I am choosing to go with using frames on this job. Also, I think with frames the cabinet will be stronger since the customer is using heavy concrete counter tops. Also, I have read a lot about the 32mm system but nothing deep and so I really know nothing about this Euro system of spacing hinge holes through line drilling and so forth. I hope to wing it a little with the first time use of the frameless hinges.

Any suggestions or advice is welcome. Thanks for the help.

Jerry

[Paul Girouard]

Go frame-less , you'll never want to build a face frame kitchen again. More free clear space in the cabinets ,better hinges , more interior options with hardware , no firring out cabinet sides so slides will work out.

The list goes on. But it's late. Your only real hurtle is with edge banding the plywood.

BTW prefinished C-2 Maple ply is a joy to work with over melamine, light weight easy to move around. You'll have no more issues with plywood than melamine , other than it's lighter / easier to use , at least IMO. You do use 3/4" ply right? If not for euro cab's you'll want to. That might be what your referring to ?? If you generally use 1/2" stock.

A F/F cabinet is not that much stronger and if you think about / study up on concrete counter-tops you'll figure out what you need to add for that.

BTW there is no 1/8" overlay , did you mean a 1/8" gap between the doors and drawer fronts?

[frank shic]

jerry, read the kiss 2 manual on cabsystems.com and the true32 book and make sure you can cut SQUARE efficiently with a tablesaw/sliding table or an accurate vertical panel saw. it's so much easier than building face frame especially if you take advantage of the 32mm system holes to hang all your hardware like the drawer slides and hinges.

[Jerry Nettrour]

Thanks, I am very tempted to go frameless on this job. I use 3/4" plywood. I dado everything and cut rabbits on all the parts to accept the back board which I use to square the box. I meant to say that the style the client is after has 1/8" reveals all around. When I think about it the frame will not even be seen and thus may be a waste of my time to build it. I have all frameless cabinets in my shop but that was because I was lazy and skipped the frames.

Thanks

Jerry

[Jim Becker]

Frameless builders I beleive use melamine or MDF core. I use Birch plywood, not MDF or melamine. The problem with that is plywood is not always straight completely which I suppose can throw off drawers and doors.

Quality cabinet plywood shouldn't be causing you issues with cabinet size work. You can do frameless just as easily with plywood as you can with composites.

[Karl Brogger]

A shop I used to work for did alot of jobs that were full overlay. We did it with face frames. Really I wouldn't do it any other way, but I have a severe distaste for European style construction. We used 1-1/2" for most of the stile widths on the face frame, and just made the doors larger for the vertical protion of the overlay, and drilled them for 11/16" overlay for the hinged sides.

One tip- don't mount your drawer fronts untill you've installed the cabinets. Adjust all your doors, nail/screw the fronts on site. Goes much easier with less hassle as sometimes you have to tweak the boxs to get them to sit the way you want. Not always, but if the floors, and walls are way out of wack it makes life much easier.

[frank shic]

if you use plywood, realize that the slight variation in thicknesses will affect your reveals slightly. as for construction, i just dado the back in and butt joint the sides to the carcase top and bottom. skip the intermediate rails on the base cabinets.

[Jerry Nettrour]

Thanks for the suggestions so far. I think I am going to take the plunge and go for the frameless construction. The time it takes me to make accurate face frames will be saved thus balancing out any additional time it takes me to learn mounting frameless hinges with the metric system. I am used to frames so I would just hold the door in place and then screw my hinge into the frame and make adjustments from there. I cut everything on a table saw and my cuts are very accurate in my opinion and thus I typically will have a very square box, never out of square by more than 1/32 or maybe 1/16 at most. Of course I have never much worried about square though with doing face frames. I guess I worried if there was any bow in the wood it would easily seen in my 1/8" reveals. Well, I am very anxious to tackle this job. I think I am going to buy peel and stick edge banding and roll it on with a J roller for ease and since I do not have any equipment for proper edge banding. I cannot foot the bill for an edge bander at this time and I think edge banding is the least of my concern since the full overlay will cover this anyway.

Any other thoughts are appreciated. I do beleive the finish look of this full overlay will be very nice and I am anxious to see our work complete.

Thanks,

Jerry

[Nissim Avrahami]

Hi Jerry

As an amateur, I made 3 kitchens in my life (and many cabinets for bathrooms and toilets) and I'm the "smart" guy....

The difference between "smart" and "wise" is that, the smart guy doesn't put himself in situations that the wise guy knows how to solve...

I made all my cabinets frameless...in Europe we make all the cabinets from white Melamine (chipboard) so they are always bright, white and look clean inside.....not only, but I use "Confirmat" screws that are in any case invisible because they are - for the base units - under and over the cabinet and for the upper cabinets on the sides.

My walls are of bricks and because they are so straight, I didn't use even "Back" and if you'll open my cabinet door, you'll see the white wall....

As for the edge banding, I'm using the "Iron-on" - just put a strip of the brown packing paper on the "Iron-on" band and "Iron" it...then, I cut the it with utility knife set at very shallow angle.

As for the "Euro hinges" installation, may I suggest that you have a look at those posts.
http://www.ridgidforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20818
http://www.ridgidforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20828

Hope it helps

Regards
niki

[frank shic]

jerry, get the fastcap fastedge PVC edgebanding. it holds extremely well and presents a much tougher edge than you'd achieve from using the iron-on wood edgebanding. another benefit is that it's prefiinished saving you more time since you're already using prefinished plywood. get a decent hinge boring jig as well as a line boring jig and keep in mind that you don't need to drill EVERY hole just the ones you need. the upper cabinets will look much better with selective line boring. if you have the extra funds, the delta 32-325 is the fastest way i know to bore all those system holes accurately. look into levelling feet to save on material used for the base cabinets.

[Jerry Nettrour]

Can anyone help me with advice on blum full overlay hinge plate installation jigs. I hear about using jigs and don't really understand the reason. I seen the jig sold at woodworker supply but what is the reason for this expense. I have always been successful drilling my cup hinges on my DP with a 35mm bit. I jut stay 4mm from the doors edge, easy enough. About the hinge plate, can I not just draw a guide line 37mm from the edge to show where my mounting screws are going to land. draw a horizontal line that leads from the inside of the side panel to the inside of the door to assist in placement of the cup hinge and plate lining up accurately. Anyway, this will be my first attempt at using these hinges as I have always used face frame hinges in the past. Any help is good. I am leaning towards just measuring for my mounting holes as I am not sure exactly of the benefit of purchasing the jig. I am sure I will learn really quick all the reasons for line boring and hinge hole jigs and so forth.

Thanks,

Jerry

[Charlie Plesums]

I made my hinge plate template out of a scrap of clear plastic... the kind that keeps you from getting into what you just bought at the borg. Use a fold along the edge of the plywood. Scratch the center line, then put a couple holes for a punch in 37 mm and the right distance apart... I don't put the shelf holes all the way to the hinges, so mount the hinges with screws - I think it looks better with fewer holes.

If you use iron-on edge banding (as I do) be sure to use a block of wood to press the edge banding firmly in place after you melt the glue with the iron. If you have perfect temperature, it may melt and cool in the time the iron passes and you don't need to press it down, but I am not usually that lucky.

Assuming you are using unfinished plywood and banding, sand the banding slightly just after trimming. The sanding dust will stick to the residual glue line and make a very smooth, pretty joint that finishes nicely.

There are lots of neat ideas with the 32 mm system, but you can build nice "Euro" style cabinets by just losing the face frame, and buying full overlay hinges to hide a full 3/4 inch side (it will actually overlay 5/8 inch), or half overlay hinges if you have hinges on both sides of a 3/4 inch divider - each door hides half of the divider.

[frank shic]

jerry, you're right: there's no need to buy a jig to mount the hinge plates to the cabinet sides. in cases where i didn't bore for system holes, i do what charles recommends in marking the center lines for the hinge out to the edge of the door then i hold the door up to the cabinet side while trying to maintain a 1/8" reveal, transfer the marks and then intersect that with a 37mm line drawn vertically from the edge and then measure 16mm from that point and bore two holes with a 5mm bit. i use the inserta press on hinge plates which save a lot of time fiddling with hinge plate screws. you could also make a master story stick (template) to help you align the hinge plates by putting the appropriate tic marks on a scrap of wood.