Build Cabinets The Easy Way | How to Build Cabinets

oh hi welcome to the first video of a three-part video series i am doing on how to build a cabinet in this video part one i'm going to show you how to build a cabinet carcass including the carcass box construction as well as the face framing in the next video i'm going to show you drawer construction and drawer slide installation and then in the final video i'm going to show you how to do drawer faces and cabinet door faces and install so watch this video learn how to build a carcass and stay tuned for the other two videos [Music] enjoy [Music] all right let's jump right in here now cabinets are nice because you don't need a lot of materials for this cabinet we're simply using one sheet of three quarter inch plywood a few sticks of three quarter inch poplar for face frames and one sheet of quarter inch plywood for our back panel in my opinion the easiest way to go about building cabinets is to first pre-cut all of your pieces then with all of your pieces pre-cut all you have to do is well hook them together now as we go through this video there might be some steps that may be a little confusing you might say what the heck's he doing that for i don't understand but i promise if you just watch the full video it will all come together and make perfect sense in the end so we're going to start by first cutting out the three main pieces of our cabinet box this includes both side pieces as well as our bottom piece all cut from three-quarter inch birch ply next on the bottom of both of our side pieces we are going to cut a three-quarter inch dadoed groove this will allow us to attach our side pieces to our bottom piece without having to use any exterior nails or screws that will be visible from the outside of your cabinet so after setting your blade to half inch to leave a quarter inch material on the plywood i like to put a sacrificial fence in place a sacrificial fence is simply a piece of wood that allows us to push the fence all the way up against the blade without scarring up our permanent fence hence the word sacrificial now i'm doing this because as you see i'm not using a dado stack why you ask well it's because i'm lazy and i also wanted to show you that you can do this without a dado stack if you don't have one you just have to make multiple passes to remove the desired three-quarter inches of material but in order to get the most accurate cut it's best to start in at our desired depth and then work our way out towards the end of the board until the blade is flush against that sacrificial fence to make our last cut as you can see i've dadoed out a nice three-quarter inch groove at the bottom of both of my side pieces this will allow me to hook those side pieces into the bottom piece just like this [Music] then with both of our side pieces dadoed i'm going to remove the sacrificial fence and set my fence to 4 inches then i'm just going to run some scrap pieces of plywood through and get a couple strips of 4 inch wide material you'll see why in just a second then i'm going to set my blade to a quarter inch high next we have to dado out a quarter inch groove on the back of our two side pieces as well as the back of our bottom piece this groove will catch the back panel of our cabinet box like i said this all makes sense here in just a few minutes again i am not using a dado stack so you'll need to run the board through twice to get your desired quarter inch thick dado and it's also very important to note that that dado needs to sit in three quarters of an inch from the back of your panels you'll see why in just a second just hold on be patient geez i like to keep a piece of scrap quarter inch ply handy just to make sure that it'll fit nicely in my dadoed out groove when you're done cutting all the dados on your side and bottom piece turn your saw off and just leave it alone don't change the settings we're going to need that dado setting here in just a minute but in the meantime we can hook together the first three pieces of our cabinet box as you can see that dadoed out groove perfectly lines up from each side piece to the bottom and this will create the perfect channel for us to slide in the back panel of our cabinet to make gluing up our cabinet box easier i like to raise my bottom panel up off my work surface this just allows me to get clamps underneath it and you know not fiddle around on a flat surface here's some helpful advice if you're going to do cabinet boxes with any regularity go out and invest in some of these woodpecker clampy thingymajigs they make clamping up cabinet boxes by yourself incredibly easy as well as allowing you to ensure that everything is nice and square as you can see your side panels should perfectly fit into your bottom panel with that three-quarter inch dado we cut previously then all you need to do is simply apply a liberal amount of glue onto the inside of that cut dado and use a glue brush as you can see i'm using my patented bourbon moth glue brush to smear the glue around and then just hook it in place [Music] as well as the woodpeckers clampy thingies worked for alignment i don't really trust them for sheer clamping force so when everything is aligned exactly how i want it i like to throw on a few additional clamps as it glues up and just like that we have the first three pieces of our cabinet box hooked together now we just have to wait for the glue to dry and then we can start working on the upper pieces but in the meantime we can get all of our additional pieces cut to size and ready to rock once that glue is dry remember those random four inch strips i had you cut down earlier yeah now's where you're going to use them so you're going to want to cut down four pieces of four inch scrap plywood now they need to be the exact length of the inside of your cabinet box and then one of those four pieces is going to need another quarter inch dadoed groove good thing you left your saw alone because now you just run it through then using a kreg jig we are going to drill pocket holes into the end of each one of these four pieces this will allow us to hook these brace pieces inside the cabinet and not use any screws coming in from the outside that you'll have to you know look at or fill or something like that then with all of our brace pieces cut we just have to cut the back panel of our cabinet box now the cabinet i'm building is actually going to be completely full of drawers and so essentially you wouldn't really need a back panel but i wanted to show you how to do this because if you're building a cabinet with cabinet doors you're going to want that panel in there so you don't just see a ugly wall behind the cabinet then the final thing we need to do before actually constructing our cabinet box completely is to build a kick plate for the box to sit on now some people integrate the kick plate into the actual cabinet box itself i'm not a huge fan of this i like to do a separate kick plate that way i can install my kick plate get them shimmed and level and then all i have to do is drop my cabinet box on top easy peasy lemon squeezy now most kick plates are between three and a half to four inches i like to go three and a half no need to go up to four that's just crazy so i cut down all my pieces for my kick plate and then i drill them out again with pocket holes and we'll use those to assemble it so you won't see any of those pesky screws all kick plates are a little different depending on the orientation of your cabinet this is how ours is going to look you'll notice that one of the corners is mitered that's because you'll actually see the kick plate on both sides so we want to miter that corner so we don't have any exposed plywood either on the front or the side of the cabinet this is how i like to do mitered corners on my kick plates it might not be the right way or the only way but this is my way i first take a piece of blue painters tape and i tape both pieces together with each end of my miter perfectly touching then i apply a dab of wood glue into the center of that miter leaving a little room on each edge then i use a few dabs of ca glue on either side and the accelerator spray the ca glue is going to dry instantly and hold the miter together while my wood glue dries essentially the ca glue is acting like a clamp in this case it's way easier than trying to get some clamps on and funky angles and hold pressure on that miter till the wood glue dries it also speeds up productivity because i can take the tape off immediately and continue constructing my kick plate finally i just hit the corner with a little 220 sandpaper you know to make it look pretty and then i construct the rest of my kick plate again using those pre-drilled pocket holes that we did you know a little while ago in this video then with our kick plate done call me old fashioned but i like to start working off the floor i mean that's where my cabinet's gonna sit in the end so might as well get down there as soon as possible so i set our three-sided cabinet box on top of the kick plate and then i can start assembling all of my internal brace pieces as well as my back panel now you might have guessed this was coming but our one brace piece that we cut the quarter inch groove sits on top of our back panel and locks it in place then i like to use just one clamp to hold my brace in place while i secure it with four pocket screws then i repeat the exact same step this time on the front of the cabinet with the front brace piece and you guessed it i do it two more times both on the bottom and top of the back of our cabinet these are what is known as our lower and upper nailer pieces these are the pieces that will actually screw through to secure the cabinet to the wall and as you can see because we inset our back panel three quarters of an inch from the back of our cabinet those pieces sit in there very nicely now the cool thing about cabinet construction is you can use it in a lot of different ways this top nailer piece could be cut with a 45 angle on the bottom to become a french cleat that way you could actually hang the cabinet off the wall if you were doing you know like an upper cabinet or something then finally i like to take a few inch and a half cabinet head screws and just secure my top brace into my back brace this just sures everything up and make sure it is not going anywhere you could probably get away without doing this but when it comes to actually securing the cabinet to the wall this will keep that back piece from bowing out at all and then i flip it over and do the exact same thing to the bottom as well and with that our box is constructed and now it's time to face frame [Music] oh to construct our face frame i'll be using three quarter inch poplar this is a paint grade piece and poplar paints amazingly now if it was going to go in a kitchen or bathroom someplace high traffic i might do something a little harder like hard maple but this is for an office so popular it is when constructing my face frame i like to start by just laying out the entire thing on the cabinet box itself that way i know it's going to be perfect i always like to do full runs on the side of my cabinet so there's not any visible end grain so after cutting them down to size next i like to clamp them in place to get them exactly where i want them usually leaving about a 30 second of an inch overhang on my plywood so that i can sand it back smooth with my two side pieces in place i then fit my internal pieces making sure they fit very nice and snug not so tight that they push my outer pieces out but also not too loose so they bring my outer pieces in see how that works i think it's physics or something then i mark all of my pieces just so i can keep track of exactly where they go then i take them off the cabinet box and move over to the bench top and hooking them together from the back side i use again pocket holes i used to hook all my face frames together with dowels or dominoes but it's just a pain in the butt to try and get everything assembled especially with internal face structures and for cabinet grade pocket holes are actually designed for this very purpose so don't feel bad using it i assemble each joint with just a dab of glue and then i like to clamp it directly down to my tabletop using one of these little grizzly hold down clamps this just makes sure it doesn't slide up or down as i screw it together and after i do one corner i just work my way around until i have done all four corners and completed my frame then with the exterior of my face frame done i can start working on the interior components now this particular cabinet is going in an office it's going to have four drawers in total two larger drawers on the bottom with two smaller drawers on top so i start by first putting in my center piece once i have that hooked in place i can cut my smaller pieces that will be my drawer dividers again you want to make sure these are nice and snug i tried to do a sexy dust blowing thing but i got sawdust in my eye what an idiot then to position your drawer dividers properly the best way i've found is to cut some spacer blocks you can just set them on the bottom of your face frame and then you just set your drawer divides in place and this will ensure that all of your drawers are identical and nice and square then you just hook them in place with those handy dandy pocket holes and just like that your face frame is complete see look i've been framed i've been framed anyways with our face frame complete it is time to attach it to our cabinet box now there's more than one way to skin a cat and there's more than one way to attach a face frame and it kind of depends on what kind of cabinet you're building if you were doing a wood grade stained cabinet then you could use pocket holes on the outside of the cabinet if it's butting up against another cabinet so you won't see the side or you could tack it on from the top that might work and you could fill the holes if it's going to be all drawers like this one you could use pocket holes from the inside because you won't actually see the inside of the cabinet but since this is paint grade i decided i was just gonna bam bam bam nail it on and fill all my holes because that's the easiest way to do it and for paint grade you can get away with it so the first thing i do is lay down a nice thick bead of glue around the entire perimeter of my cabinet box and then using my patented glue spreader i spread it out and just plop the face frame on there and then once it's right where i want it i just tack it down with about you know four to five nails per side until it is held securely in place when it comes to filling nail holes there are good ways to do it and bad ways to do it this is what i like to use it's this dapp plastic wood they make two kinds of this product a water-based as well as an alcohol based definitely spring for the alcohol based it works much better and dries much quicker now when you fill the hole you don't want to just push it all down there so that the wood filler is flush with the top of the face frame you want to fill the hole and then kind of mound the filler up on top that way as it dries and shrinks which it will do it will shrink into that pile so that when you sand it it will be flush and you won't have shrunken little nail holes all the way around your face frame next is the bane of every cabinet maker's existence is trying to get no line where your face frame meets your plywood now the best method i have found for achieving this is this product by mohawk it's a two-part epoxy filler the white part on the inside and the black part on the outside it also comes in multiple colors i prefer the black so i can see when i've sanded it away you just mash it together and smear it in the crack it dries crazy hard and it doesn't shrink which is really nice and it'll give you a perfect seam then with that all filled you just have to sand your face frame thoroughly getting rid of any ridges or edges now stop everything for a second i've heard a lot of people say when they're sanding the transition between face frame and plywood that they're very worried about burning through the plywood veneer now i understand this if you're doing a finish grade piece with a veneered hardwood plywood but when it comes to paint grade don't worry about sanding through the veneer you want a smooth transition that should be your number one goal and if you have to sand through the veneer like you're gonna see me do here in just a second to achieve that it's worth doing it'll paint beautifully and you'll never be able to tell that you went through the veneer once it's all painted as you can see i couldn't give two cares that i'm burning through the veneer all i care about is that you're not going to be able to see the seam between the face frame and the plywood and then the very last thing i like to do is just take a piece of sandpaper and by hand break down all the internal edges of my face frame so there's no splinters or chip outs and they are nice to the touch well hudalali hudalali our cabinet is done and ready for drawers and eventually drawer faces hey well i hope you enjoyed that video i hope you learned something as you can see building a cabinet carcass isn't really that difficult you can definitely do it by following all the steps i just showed you and stay tuned for the other two videos that will be coming out in the coming weeks where i show you how to do drawer construction drawer slide installation as well as drawer faces and cabinet doors so you're not going to miss that also check out some of these other videos that are floating around my head and click that subscribe button right down there okay bye

Channel: Bourbon Moth Woodworking

Views: 800,696

Rating: 4.9383121 out of 5

Keywords: how to build cabinets, how to make cabinets, build cabinets the easy way, cabinets, diy, woodworking, making cabinets, building cabinets, diy cabinets, woodworking projects, kitchen cabinets organization, cabinet making plywood, building plywood cabinets, making cabinets from plywood, face frame, cabinet making, making kitchen cabinets, kitchen cabinets painting, cabinet making business, woodworking projects for beginners, kitchen cabinets ideas, kitchen cabinets, cabinet maker

Id: 89WeF52XwcI

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020