timber vs plastic  

Nicely said
and a great contribution to the subject, kdc. Let's hear more. By default I made woodworking (cabinetmaking and, later, furituremaking) my career, following a design education. I have just retired from what may be my last full-time stint in a shop. So, the subject is near and dear, as they say.

I've
overstated my case, there; of course there is still a lot of "joinery" in joinery. Not all joints can be big generous laps, no matter what the design. Pieces of wood need to meet in a number of different ways.
The ins and outs of this are endless. One critical observation was that dowels drilled into end grain can have great strength, while dowels "penetrating the tree" (i.e., across the grain) are always suspect, due to wood movement and to minimal glue bond because of end grain.

To HP I think you were asking me?
The timber I used on my A/V cabinet was nothing more than furniture grade birch faced plywood. I have left the edges unfinished so the multi-layers of the ply are a design element. The whole unit is wall mounted and swings away like a door so as to provide access to the back of all the equipment for wire management. It is an articulated sheetrock wall with the cabinet mounted below. Currently it has a light polyurethane coating. I will sand down and pickle with a light whitewash to match the random geometric shaped plywood panels with polished aluminum seperators that cover an adjacent wall. Would love to post photos, but I am not sure how to do so. Is there a thread somewhere within this forum that gives a tutorial on adding photos?

posting photos on here is...
posting photos on here is tricky, get the image hosted on photobucket then copy and paste the 'direct link' code for that image between the quotes below.

Marcel Breuer did some really good sliding door wall hung cabinets with black perforated thin ply doors, is it something like that? How did you get a really smooth edge? I used to see some nice ply around with a lot of layers (like for ping pong padles) but its hard to get now.
I actually saw a cheap plastic edge band for melamine coated particle board a few years ago that had a fake plywood edge pattern, Ive rarely been so apalled.

oops, sorry man, do a forum...
oops, sorry man, do a forum search and it will come up, get your images hotsed on photobucket first and resize them on there, its quite simple.