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I've built a kitchen-style cabinet for my office and I'm wondering if I've put enough legs on it. I couldn't find any standards for this sort of thing in my Googling, so here I have turned to the internet for advice.

The unit is MDF, 1400 x 500 x 710mm (wdh) and constitutes 3 equal width (or close enough for me) compartments with a set of drawers between 2 regular cupboards that will have internal shelves.

For construction I've got a solid bottom and sides, with 2 stretchers across the top. For the dividers I have pocket screwed into the base and screwed throught the strechers.

I expect the units to take a fair bit of weight for storage of art supplies and anything else laying around my office.

I'm just wondering if the following leg layout will be enough to prevent any sort of bowing/sagging.

For context, I am using standard Hafele kitchen legs:

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Bottom view

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Leg offsets

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physicsboy
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2 Answers2

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Hafele.com no longer shows that kind of cabinet leg. However, a similar kind of plastic leg on Hafele.com has a 150kg (330lb) weight load limit. Filling the cabinets with pillows will probably be nowhere near too much. Lead ingots, meh, could be a problem....

One trouble could come from what's put on top of the cabinets, considering where the legs are mounted. You show a 65mm offset on the sides and 45mm on the back. Most MDF sheet stock for cabinets are 16-19mm (5/8 to 3/4") thick, or if you paid for premium (!) MDF cabinets 25mm (1") thick. Backs are often cheaped on as well, using often 3-12mm (1/8" to 1/2") material. This means your legs are completely on the bottom piece of the cabinet, with only the joint between the bottom piece and the sides/back holding up the rest of the cabinet and top-stored load. If there is too much load up top and the sides are not thoroughly-custom-cabinet-shop-quality attached to the bottoms, the sides could shear off the bottoms and collapse. Moving the legs on the sides so they partially sit under the sides of the cabinet, and adding more legs, total of eight, so there are legs under the side-to-side joints at the middle cabinet, will substantially increase the load capacity.

eight legs, mounted under cabinet sides

Triplefault
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If these are all separate cabinet boxes, basically slapped up against each other, you want feet as close to the walls as possible. Feet in the middle of a horizontal panel will subject the panel to more bending force. I'd put 4 feet in the middle cabinet, basically replicating the locations you have for the outer cabinets. This assumes the adjacent cabinet walls are all fastened together.

Huesmann
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