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Here are the details to build the base units of the kitchen cabinet and assemble them.
Building the bases
At this point, you’ve seen some of the basic considerations that went into my kitchen design. Now it’s time to roll up the sleeves and get into the actual construction.
The first step is to build the base units. As you can see in the drawings at right, the base units are simply big plywood boxes with dividers and a face frame on the front.
 I built the boxes (carcases) out of birch veneer plywood. I decided against melamine or MDF core plywood because those materials lose much of their strength once you cut through the outer skin/veneer. (They also produce some nasty dust.) I used ?" plywood for the carcase sides (A), the carcase bottom (B), and the divider panels (C).The back (D) is ?" plywood. The nailer (E), used for mounting the cabinet to the wall, is solid birch. Since the toe kick (F) is the only exposed portion of the carcase, I made it from solid cherry. One trick I learned early on was to perform all similar machining operations together.
That way, I didn’t waste time switching tool setups back and forth. For example, I cut all the cabinet parts to size first, then installed my dado blade and made all the joinery cuts.
Use simple joinery
Joinery in the carcases is simple but strong. Dadoes are cut in the sides (A) to accept the bottom (B), and rabbets are cut along the back edge of the sides for the back (D) as shown in the photos at left and the drawing above.
The bottom is dadoed for the divider panels (C) and grooved on the lower face for the toe kick (F). Besides strength, these dadoes and grooves help keep things lined up squarely during assembly.
To fit the nailer (E) in place, I notched the top corner of the divider panels using a jigsaw. Screws hold the nailer to the divider panels and the carcase sides.
The plywood back completes the carcase and helps square up the entire assembly. I glued and clamped the back to the nailer and nailed it to the sides, divider panels, and bottom using ?"-long ringshank nails.The rings grab the wood so the nails won’t loosen up over time.
Now you have learned how to build the bases of the kitchen cabinets and use simple joinery, in the next article, I will tell you cabinet face frame assembly.
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