Pre-made pine panels?

[Jason White]

Anybody ever use the pre-glued pine panels from the home center? These are the panels that come shrink-wrapped in plastic and are several pieces of pine all jointed and glued up ready to go.

Wondering if these are truly flat enough for building some basic cabinets? I have a couple of "quick and dirty" projects and would love to avoid all that ripping and jointing if possible (and avoid edge-banding plywood).

Jason

[Brian Willan]

Hi Jason

I have used these panels for a number of cabinets and bookshelves and they work quite well. The ones I used were from Home Depot and they were knotty pine.

Another friend of mine uses the same panels to make karate belt racks for his martial arts school and he has not gotten any complaints about using a pre-glued panels.

Cheers

Brian

[Dewey Torres]

I have used them before. They are pretty flat and stable. You may find some minor voids that will have to be addressed if you are planning on painting them but that could be taken care of easily.
Dewey

[Ron Dunn]

I used these panels when I was starting out, when every attempt at making my own turned into a disaster.

One thing to watch is the presence of finger jointing (is that what you call it in US?). I'm talking about the zig-zag end-to-end joins that may appear randomly in the board. Their presence may cause you trouble for cutting and/or finishing.

We have two basic types of these panels in Australia - knotty, which as the name suggests is FULL of knots; and clear, which still has some knots but is more likely to include finger joints.

One piece of furniture I made using these panels - a chest of drawers - has survived more than fifteen years of abuse by two sons now at university.

[Dennis Montgomery]

I have used the 1" thick ones from Lowes for my shop work tables. They work great, but you will need to look them over real good because some will be warped in the store.

[Chris Barnett]

Used a rather heavy duty thick one from Lowes years ago as a replacement table for my RAS. That was years ago; it is still flat as a pancake, but has some strange groves in it now :). Seriously thinking of replacing it with another one to make the RAS pretty enough to sell so I have more space. I am truly out of floor space.
Yes, these panels are nicely made and of reasonable cost.

[Lance Norris]

I also have used these with good results. I built a king size, book case style headboard and night stands out of the panels from Lowes. The back part of the headboard was a 16" wide panel and it is still flat and crack free.