Always Glass for kitchen cabinet doors ?????

[mbaybut]

Which is better glass or plastic? Mike

[Edwin Pawlowski]

Considering how the grease will get on them over time, I'd much rather clean glass.

IMO, the glass doors look nice in the showroom. Damned if I'd want them in my kitchen. My cabinets are used to store dishes and foodstuffs, not pretty candles and gadgets with bows on them. If you can afford that kind of space, go right ahead. Ed

[bridger]

better? what kind of better are ya askin' about, son?

image quality (transparency)-- glass

chemical stability (resists cleaning solvents)-- glass

mechanical strength-- plastic (though tempered glass is prettty dang strong)

[Michael Daly]

But scratch resistance - glass.

Mike

[xrongor]

plastic would be an extremely poor choice.

imho glass isnt much better. if you want them 'open', just leave them open and dont bother with doors.

randy

[rj]

Go for the glass, my wife wanted glass doors in her kitchen cabinets too. I routed a rabbet around the back side of the doors and took them to a glass shop to have the glass cut. (I'm an amateur & the doors weren't all exactly the same). I held the glass in place with "glass clips" from a hardware catalog. That way if SWMBO wants wood, all I have to do is remove the glass and insert a piece of 1/4" plywood.

I didn't get this old by being stupid ! Ray

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

Depends. If you are building something really big you might want to consider polycarbonate, its a lot lighter and much stronger than glass. 'Bulletproof' 'glass' is actually polycarbonate, often in a sandwich with safety glass.

My wife unit wants me to make some overlay frames for the non safety glass windows on the ground floor of our house. This is to stop children going through. The glass is over a hundred years old and was made by blowing a cylinder of glass, then opening it out to make a plate. These windows are 50" square so replacement with the same stuff would be expensive.

So I have been trying to calculate the thickness of polycarbonate that stops a 40lb child thrown at 5mph.

Phill

[J. Clarke]

I think you'll find that any commercial thickness will do that--the problem is doing it without deflecting far enough to contact and break the glass.

Rather than trying to calculate it, make up a test rig the size of your biggest window, put a piece of plywood behind it at the same spacing as the windown, smear it with something that will transfer easily (peanut butter if you don't have anything else), then toss a sandbag at it. If there is no peanut-butter transfer then you're there. If there is, try the next thickness up until you find the one that's stiff enough.

You might also want to mount it with some venting--if it's a tight seal then even if the polycarbonate doesn't contact the glass, you might break it from the air pressure increase at impact.

Rather than polycarbonate, consider acrylic--you're not trying to stop bullets, you're trying to keep a kid accidentally walking through a window, and acrylic is up to that just fine--further, it's a bit stiffer than polycarbonate (as anybody who has tried to use both in insufficient thickness for a router table insert will tell you) so you won't need quite so much thickness to avoid deflecting it into the glass.

Lastly, if you are going with polycarbonate in the windows talk to the building inspector first--the stuff is burglar-resistant which means that it's also fireman-resistant and there are some special considerations with regard to window latches and the like that may be required to work around that issue.