Lighter and stronger cabinets

[Brianf7028]

So I was lurking around on another DIY camper site and found this:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q...A&&FORM=VDRVRV

They are building cabinets from foam. I wonder how you attach doors and drawer all slides.

[TomsBeast]

Originally Posted by Brianf7028

I wonder how you attach doors and drawer all slides.

There's a technique that boat guys use on fiberglass skin and foam filled Boston Whalers, I've used it and it held up to 5 seasons of hard duck hunting use. Essentially you drill a small hole where you want to anchor a screw, hollow out the inner foam core by fishing an allen wrench into the hole, spin the allen wrench with a drill motor, making a 1" or so diameter cavity. Inject epoxy into the cavity, forming a plug, that you can drill and tap, of use self tapping screws to anchor into.

[rockbender]

I watched that video the other evening as well. My thought is that the foam takes up a lot of precious space, but I like the concept.

[moorefc]

Sportsmobile has switched over to Corelight corelite? cabinet material that is a plywood structure. My 350 cabinets were made with it from Austin. Much lighter than the particleboard, and a bit better around moisture. Trouble is, the manufacturer will not sell retail, so it has to come from Sportsmobile or other OEM....

[Steve_382]

SMB Texas had a van at Expo East in November with the new cabinets. They looked pretty good and now have an aluminum trim on the edges instead of the PVC trim. It shouldn't shrink or expand as much as the older PVC trim, but had a fairly sharp corner. They indicated that future versions would have a softer edge on the aluminum trim corners.

[pjtpj]

Originally Posted by Brianf7028

So I was lurking around on another DIY camper site and found this:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q...A&&FORM=VDRVRV

They are building cabinets from foam. I wonder how you attach doors and drawer all slides.

They have reinvented composite sandwich panels with inferior and possibly cheaper materials. IMO, that is a lot of time and effort to sink into something that would be a lot better with an upgrade of materials. A standard composite sandwich panel would use resin and fiberglass instead of primer and bug screen and core foam (or core balsa, honeycomb, etc.) instead of polyiso foam (much less likely to delaminate).

One way to attach fasteners in a panel made like this is to embed wood wherever you know you'll want to attach fasteners. Another is, as suggested previously, to use epoxy. Another way to epoxy items onto sandwich panels is to use epoxy to one of the skins as the primary bond, but use fasteners though one skin to register and hold the parts in place while the epoxy dries. The strongest way is to sandwich the sandwich panel with metal plates on each side and bolts all the way through.

[pjtpj]

We build cabinets out of welded 1" aluminum angle. The frames are strong on their own, so they could be paneled with anything. Our basic paneling is silver corrugated plastic. The countertops are molded sandwich panels. The molds allow us to use gelcoat as out standard finished surface (like a boat hull). To attach things like doors and drawer slides, we weld angles into the frames. This type of construction isn't for everybody, but it is strong, lightweight, refinishable and should last a long time.