Face Frame, Frameless, Overlay & Inset

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the terms in the title of this post. I hope to clear them up here. There doesn’t seem to be a standardized definition of overlay in the cabinetmaking industry, so the definition that CabWriter has adopted is as follows:

• Overlay applies only to a door or drawer front that sits on a face frame and overlays the opening by an Door/Drawer Overlay Distance. The Door/Drawer Overlay Distance default in CabWriter is 3/8″.
• Face Frame designs can have either Inset or Overlay doors.
• Frameless designs use only Inset doors and drawers. That makes sense since the doors and drawers in Face Frame Inset designs lay on the same plane as all doors and drawers of a Frameless design. The default Inset should always be selected in a Frameless design; never choose Overlay for a Frameless design.

In CabWriter you can have face frame or  frameless designs or a hybrid of each. The image above right is the same design as the other two in this post. It is a pure frameless design meaning it is constructed without any rails or stiles drawn and the doors/drawers drawn as slabs (actually, there are a lot more changes in this design such as No selected for Alignment Slots but I will provide a CabWriter Defaults file to cover that shortly).

The image shown above left is a full face frame design without bottom rail. The only difference between it and the image shown below right is that Inset has been changed to Overlay (the default is 3/8″ overlay) and the Bottom Rail is drawn. Overlay doors only work with full face frame designs (all stiles and rails drawn including bottom rail).

The most popular frameless designs are pure frameless. If that is the style of cabinet design you wish to use you can download this zipped Frameless.cwd file. Be sure to unzip it and put the unzipped Frameless.cwd file in the Pluginscabwritercabwriter_defaults folder. If there is a file with that same name already there replace it with this file. If you don’t know the location of your Plugins folder on your machine the full directory name on my machine is:

C:UsersJoeAppDataRoamingSketchUpSketchUp 2017SketchUpPluginscabwritercabwriter_defaults

Also, you can download and read my SketchUp Extension Installation Procedure PDF. It will tell you how to locate your Plugins folder and then you should be able to place the Frameless.cwd file in the Pluginscabwritercabwriter_defaults folder.

When you have placed Frameless.cwd in the Pluginscabwritercabwriter_defaults folder open your SketchUp model and use Open and Load CabWriter Defaults   to load this file into the CabWriter Settings. Open and Load CabWriter Defaults  is a tool in the CabWriter toolbar. Click on this tool and you will get something like this:

Use the drop down to select Frameless and then press the Load button. It will open the CabWriter Settings dialog box which will already have the changes in it. Simply close the CabWriter Settings dialog box and draw (or Re-Draw) your cabinets and you should get the results you are looking for.