How To Make Kitchen Cabinets (Best of American Woodworker)

Nice how to book and reference with many pictures.

Excellent book....loads of ideas...

I was looking for a book that would show me how to build modern corner cabinets for a kitchen. This book only has two pages on building frameless cabinets in the entire thing. With most kitchens being built today with frameless cabinets, this book is a little out of date. You could not buy this book and build yourself a kitchen.

I purchased this book along with Udo Schmidt's Building Kitchen Cabinets. Although both books deal with the same subject matter, they are quite different from one another. This book is more of a conglomeration of specific aspects of cabinet building by different craftsmen/authors. This book doesn't touch on design much, but focuses more on the actual building. What I like about this book is the detailed section on European hinges (and slides) as well as the section on custom ideas and how to incorporate things like undermount knife racks and toe kick drawers.Although the book doesn't necessarily follow a predictable pattern of design, carcass construction, doors, drawers, and installation it is pretty easy to read and follow. I like that there are side bars that show what errors can be commonly made and how to prevent or fix them. The section on installing the cabinets is filled with good ideas for scribing and fitting like a professional. I wish there was a detailed section on drawer construction box but this was missing. The section deals mostly with lipped vs. standard drawers.One thing both books lack is a any real information of frameless or "European" style cabinets. This book has a section on it, but it's extremely limited and in my opinion pretty useless as far as carcass assembly. As this was published only a couple of years ago the ideas, tools, designs, and hardware shown and discussed is relatively recent and relevant. I would recommend this book for anyone wanting to build their own cabinets, the information contained in it is certainly useful.

Got this first from my local library and was so taken with all the little tips and tricks that I up and bought one from Amazon. This is one you want to have on hand to go over and over through the years. It's not the best laid out book for building cabinets in a linear fashion (do this first and this second etc) but a great addition to my confidence and experience level. After going through it a couple of times I feel like I've been building cabinets a few years longer than I really have. It's full of lots of little ideas and tricks of the trade that one might not think of left to their own devices. A treasure trove of ideas and practical knowledge that I'm sure I'll use from now on.