Tulip Poplar finishes and stains very well and can be very pale, but as I said stains to any color..

 

So why don't you use the BB for the fronts and edge band them with walnut or birch edgebanding.
https://www.rockler.com/hot-melt-edge-bandings-50-foot-rolls
Top one

 

What about regular birch? Closest I can think of.

 

Thanks all for your comments.

So why don t you use the BB for the fronts and edge band them with walnut or birch edgebanding.
https://www.rockler.com/hot-melt-edge-bandings-50-foot-rolls
Top one

- CommonJoe

and cover my dovetails? heresy!

 

Thanks all for your comments.

So why don t you use the BB for the fronts and edge band them with walnut or birch edgebanding.
https://www.rockler.com/hot-melt-edge-bandings-50-foot-rolls
Top one

- CommonJoe

and cover my dovetails? heresy!

- klinkman

You are going to have exposed dovetails from the outside? Then it won't really matter as even if you got a matching wood, the end grain of the sides will be a different color after finishing.

 

Crap information in, crap information out.

- CommonJoe

Hey Joe, Pardon me for not providing the exact terminology you needed to help a fellow wood worker out. Just a hobbiest here with no professional experience. Lighten up man, it ain't that serious. Maybe you missed the wink? We could all stand a little more grace or patience in these times. No one here trying to make you look bad. peace

 

are going to have exposed dovetails from the outside?

- SMP

I was going to use a 1/2 blind DT with the drawer front flush with the face frame when closed. If I used BB the lamination will be on display when the drawer is open.

 

are going to have exposed dovetails from the outside?

- SMP

I was going to use a 1/2 blind DT with the drawer front flush with the face frame when closed. If I used BB the lamination will be on display when the drawer is open.

- klinkman

You can buy BB ply in various thicknesses. If you bought some 3/4 for the fronts and used 1/2" for the sides you'll be fine.

 

Pawlonia
Linden (basswood)
Beech

 

Birch will be a good match, but you'll want sapwood, rather than heartwood, and birch has little sapwood, which means you're going to have a hard time making a match with solid lumber. Plywood preferentially uses birch sapwood for the surface veneer and the darker heartwood goes in the middle. But there are vendors who sell (for a significant upcharge) just the sapwood you want.

Edge-banding before you cut your DTs would be an option too. It would be a lot more work than I would want to do, but it'll get the effect you're looking for. Or cut off a 45 degree chunk and miter that piece of ply back on in the other direction (probably with a spline) so you have the face on the edge. That would be a lot of work, but you could get a same-board match, at the cost of some strength and a lot of work.

 

Beech, selected for color match, would be ok and is easy to find. Solid birch of course would be best, but it can vary a lot in color.

The plywood is radially cut so finding matching (non) grain may prove difficult.

 

In my experience yellow birch lumber matches very closely. Around here sapwood-only yellow birch is cheap and readily available. When I built my kitchen cabinets I used bb plywood for the carcasses and banded them in solid yellow birch. Also made the doors out of yellow birch, with birch plywood panels. Color matches very closely, although like splintergroup says the grain pattern is a bit different due to the way plywood is peeled from the log.

I was curious about Dave's comment that birch has little sapwood, which hasn't been my experience. A bit of googling and I came across this table from a forestry article comparing yellow birch to sugar maple:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Heartwood-proportion-of-sugar-maple-and-yellow-birch-in-relation-to-tree-age_fig5_295242789

It turns out that up to about 150 years old, yellow birch trees only have marginally more heartwood than sugar maple.

 

Again, thanks all for weighing in.
My searches on birch were neither fruitful in my area nor reasonably priced when I could find it.
I'm going to run some finishing tests with bass wood as it has better availability and is more reasonably priced.

 

This is a scrap piece of soft maple sitting atop some 5/8" Baltic Birch. The maple is towards the lighter side as far as maple goes. Not perfect but close

 

^ I was thinking maple, as well. That's a good match, right there.

 

I've used maple, which matches well with Birch ply. One of my last projects required plugs to cover screw holes in the sides of cabinet carcasses made with Birch ply. I cut the plugs, glued them in, and trimmed with a flush cut saw and they basically matched the birch ply veneer. You obviously could also use maple hardwood edging glued to the sides of the plywood drawers.

Another technique I used recently on a birch ply shop cabinet for cleaning supplies was maple edge banding-the first time I tried edge banding plywood. Bought a role of the edging from Amazon, together with a plastic trimmer that you squeeze the sides together on and run along the banding ($15). Got an old iron from the thrift store for $3 to heat the edge banding glue.

I was very pleased with the result and will probably used edge banding for future plywood cabinetry. Suggest you look into edge banding as suggested by the jocks here.

Gerry

 

I too would try the edge banding. Just a caution note, If your are going to stain the absorption difference between the BB plywood and Basswood will end up with two different outcomes.

 

I ve used maple, which matches well with Birch ply. One of my last projects required plugs to cover screw holes in the sides of cabinet carcasses made with Birch ply. I cut the plugs, glued them in, and trimmed with a flush cut saw and they basically matched the birch ply veneer. You obviously could also use maple hardwood edging glued to the sides of the plywood drawers.

- NohoGerry

I've done this as well. I could barely tell where the plugs were and I'm the one who installed them!

 

Beech, selected for color match, would be ok and is easy to find. Solid birch of course would be best, but it can vary a lot in color.

The plywood is radially cut so finding matching (non) grain may prove difficult.

- splintergroup

Is there a color/grain difference between beech and European beech?

 

regular Birch…

 

What I do to get an edge banding to match the BB plywood is to cut a piece of BB the width of the thickness of the panel. Then I rip the cut piece of BB ply leaving a thin BB veneer. That is glued to the edge, perfect match.