BEST PLYWOOD FOR CABINET REPAIR OR BUILDING FROM SCRATCH
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If you've ever gone to Home Depot and tried to find an actual flat piece of plywood, you know how difficult it can be.
Big box store's plywood is terrible, full of voids and patches (known as "boatmen").
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These boatmen often telegraph through the paint over the years as the wood expands and contracts.
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Voids in cheap plywood can come back and bite you in the ass.
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Big Box stores also sell "Oak" or "Birch" plywood. Don't be fooled, that plywood is the same soft Pine plywood as the other junk, just with a paper thin veneer of Oak on the two faces.
This veneer is so thin, that you can sand through it in a blink of an eye.
This veneer is so thin, that often underlying boatmen telegraph through the veneer over time.
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Even the veneer of Oak plywood is very "open grain" so the grain will require much filling and sanding to give a smooth paint surface.
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Baltic Birch is a great plywood with about 3x the number of plys for the same thickness sheet.
The 1/4" Baltic Birch is great stuff for the bottom panel of a cabinet.
But 3/4" Baltic Birch is 2.25 pounds per square foot, compared to regular plywood at 1.4 pounds - so it makes for a VERY heavy cabinet. Do not underestimate how heavy a Baltic cabinet will end up being!
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All those plys in Baltic Birch make it very stable, because they are all the same wood species; Birch.
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The best plywood for building cabs from scratch is MDO Plywood. Medium Density Overlay Plywood.
It's real plywood, so it glues and holds screws perfectly.
But it has a thin venier of MDF on both faces, that is usually pre-primed.
Because the MDF is 50x thicker than a "birch" veneer, the defects in the underlying wood do not telegraph through.
The MDF is perfectly flat. No filling, no sanding, no graining, no telegraphing and usually no priming is needed.
This saves you about 8 hours of prep time, and gives you a flatter cab than you could sand by hand.
Williams used this stuff on it's latter games that had super detailed silkscreened graphics.
http://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/panel-products/industrial-panels/mdf-mdo-panels/roseburg-3-4-x-4-x-8-mdo-plywood/p-1444452506069-c-13338.htm?tid=8840372650345142831
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