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I thought I knew what each of these were, until I took a closer look at home depot.

The particleboard im used to has larger "particles" while MDF looks like sawdust glued together.

At Home Depot they had these large brown sheets that looked like cardboard, but was called MDF, and the particle board they had was fine fine particle particle board. (It looked identical to melamine coated boards)

The dark brown "mdf" had edges broken and i could marr it with my fingernail, while the particleboard was hard and its corners were hard and id need something metal to marr it.

Am I going crazy? Is this dark brown, soft, cardboard like substance really mdf and Ive been confusing myself all along? If so, why does the melamine coated material look like their "particle" board instead???

*CONFUSED****

Both MDF and particle-board (PB) come in a variety of grades, but I will generalize.

1) MDF is a very fine grade sawdust held together with glue. It does look a bit like cardboard. The different grades look very much alike.

2) PB does vary quite a bit and this variation is easy to see. It is a coarser grade of sawdust held together with glue.

3) What us herpers call melamine is a PB coated with a melamine plastic.

So yes, the cardboard looking stuff you saw was MDF.

It seems you are having a REALLY hard time trying to decide what to use. Might I suggest buying a manufactured rack? Don`t get me wrong, I asked a TON of questions myself before building my own cages and racks out of MDF. Chris Harper is one of the most knowledgeable people you will find, gave me lots of advice. If you are not dead set on racks, you might want to try his "tote" cage design. It really depends on what your main objective is, mine being economics. I decided to use MDF over melamine because it is about $2 to $3 cheaper a 4' X 2' panel, and I can live with my decision. I don`t have a way of hauling 4' X 8' sheets, and I don`t trust the jokers at Home Depot to make the cuts for me. Not saying MDF is the way to go for you, you will have to decide that for yourself. Or just buy one of the many pre-fab racks available, they take all the guess work out of it for you. Best of luck to you, regardless what route you take.

Vampire

Lol, you can think what you want...

I've worked a lot of construction jobs, drywallng, mudding, putting up walls, ceilings, floors, tongue and groove hardwood flooring, etc etc.

I worked in a lumberyard for 2 summers when I was 15 and 16... didn't deal with MDF much at all, not enough to recall it...

I have never worked with mdf... and particleboard that I am used to is L"OW LOW grade large particles... Ive not worked with finer grain particle board, or MDF... this is the reason for my confusion.

I was told that Melamine is melamine coated mdf... hence my confusion when i saw a softer MDF type board that looked different than the melamine base appeared.

I appreciate your "concern" but I was confident enough to build a rack 3 weeks ago. I am a perfectionist, and tend to ask a ton of questions to make sure. I wouldnt have put all of this thought into building a rack if I felt like buying one for 3-5x the price, not to mention that the number of these i will be building will save me a lot of money....

Lastly what I plan on buliding isnt commercially available... by building it myself I can build it to my exact specifications.

Thanks to Chris for responding about mdf..

Particle board is healed together by resins and contains formaldehyde, The more popular grades being Commercial, Industrial and Spec. The Spec is a whole lot harder than the other 2 and out lasts the other 2 as well. The commercial is the cheepo grade of particle board and I wouldn’t advise using it for anything LOL, The products you see in home depot or lows have been laminated by a third party company, Sorry but I could not help replying to this, I make particle board for a living LOL You would be amazed at what goes into making just one sheet of ¾ 61”X97” board
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