Building Upper Face Frame Cabinets

Individual face frame members fasten to the foundation boxes one piece at a time held in place with glue and clamps or glue and metal pins or brads.

Building upper face frame cabinets. With frameless construction you make all the parts before assembling anything. You assemble the boxes then make the face frames to fit them. I definitely recommend face frame cabinets over frameless or euro style and the good news is face frames are pretty easy to build. The sample base and wall cabinets shown below have these features to make building them as simple as possible.

Frameless and face frame cabinets tools used. In this 9 part video tutorial series festool trainer brent shively teaches how to build two types of cabinets. This style is referred to as frameless or european style cabinet. One of the easiest cabinet carcasses to build is an upper cabinet and to make it even easier there s no face frame.

E joints between stiles and rails get rein forced with 20 biscuits or dowels plunged into the assembled joints from the top. That s a big challenge in building conventional face frame cabinets. Face frames cover plywood edges. Above the bottom shelf of the cabinet.

The plans show how 3 4 thick solid wood 21 4 to 21 2 wide is used for most face frame members. Face frames on sides of kitchen cabinets should overlap 1 4 in. Well since the face frame is 1 4 bigger on the ends you can simply use 1 4 plywood in matching veneer or painted as we did to finish out those ends. This makes room for adjustments when installing them next to one another.

Begin with the right cabinet dimensions. Wood magazine s kevin boyle shows you this foolproof method expla. Learn how to make simple face frame upper and lower cabinets including doors and drawers. Build the face frame so that the bottom rail rails are horizontal boards and stiles are vertical boards projects 1 16 in.

Then follow up by making the doors and drawers. For the upper kitchen cabinet drawings and materials list in pdf format click here. While the lack of face frame does allow for the possibility of racking face coming out of square during installation it does allow for a more efficient use of cabinet space.