NOPEC
Well-known member
Part 2 - Cabinetry
Once I had played with and changed around the cardboard mock up of the inside cabinetry, it was time to get going on it. As I mentioned before, I chose to work with wood just because of familiarity. I certainly under stand the not insignificant weight gain with it but I have done my best to keep the weight modest.
Stating the obvious, the cabinetry is the most important (and longest and hardest) part of this build out and I will just deal with it in this post.
The wood I used was mostly 1/2”(10 mm) Baltic birch for the cupboard faces, 1/4” (5 mm) for the cupboard shelves and hardwoods for the cleats.
Because of the limited space for storage with the regular cab truck, there has to be considerable storage in the camper. I have tried to keep it low but the reality is that there is only so much space in an 8 foot camper.
The cabinets were build with only two sides, sharing the other two sides with a neighbouring cabinet or a wall. Cleats were used exclusively to attach everything, all glued with Sika 221. I cheated a bit with the cleats by using small galvanized finishing nails to hold everything in place, along with painter's tape, while everything cured. I used wood glue and lots of clamps to hold the cabinets together during set up.
There was a combination of cubbie hole openings and actual cupboard door faces. The door faces were made with descending opening sizes so that cutouts from one opening could be used as a door face on a smaller cupboard opening.
The cabinetry went well and the only limiting factor was my skill level. The plywood has a very thin veneer and most mistakes were with the chipping or delamination of the various cuts, mitigated somewhat by at least one initial coat of the finish (oil based “Minwax Satin”)
Here are some photos of my progress to date.
The cupboard handles were made by sawing a wooden drawer pull in half and then inserting the two pieces bilaterally into the face of the cubpoard doors. A bit of fiddling around but fun. I reused a bit of the painters tape, being cheap and all....
A lot of time was spent gluing cleats to the FRP walls for screwing stuff down
The kitchen was the most complicated so it came last.
Doing a mock up for the counter top was a bit of a physcolgical boost, especially in the middle of the winter. It felt suddenly that there was to be life after cabinetry.......
The Arborite was just as inspring!!
I am pretty much finished the build now so I will get Part 3 of this thread out quite quickly. Once the cabinetry was done, thing went way more quickly!!