Building Cabinet Drawers

If the cabinet is more than 30 in.

Building cabinet drawers.

Building drawers still stress me out every single time. This means some extra building work and buying more slides but the smaller rollouts will operate more smoothly and easily. Wider shelves and drawers tend to bind or rack as you slide them in and out. Discover the secrets to making strong drawers by cutting locking rabbet joints on the tablesaw as taught by wood magazine design editor jeff mertz.

Let s stick with those since it makes sizing your drawer super. In wood magazine torture tests this drawer joint proved stronger than even dovetails. My journey learning to build drawers the very first time i built a drawer was for this x leg accent. Most traditional side mounted drawer slides require 1 2 clearance on each side of the drawer.

Also i make all my drawers using plywood for the box and plywood for the bottom. I like to use plywood to build my drawers because then i don t have to worry about twisted or warped boards causing me issues with alignment. How to build a cabinet drawer choose your drawer material. Building drawers are almost like a rite of passage going from beginner woodworker to more intermediate woodworker.

The 3 4 plywood case eliminates panel jointing planing and glue ups. To assemble the drawer box first apply a small amount of glue to each of the dovetail joints. Sliding dovetails aren t just for building bookcases. The sample base and wall cabinets shown below have these features to make building them as simple as possible.

Begin with the right cabinet dimensions. Face frames cover plywood edges. Wide consider installing two narrower rollouts side by side rather than a single wide one. But i don t try to stay away from them anymore.

Overlaps on the sides let you fine tune the cabinet width during installation. Avoid getting glue into the dado grooves position the first two pieces with the dovetails aligned and tap the dovetail joints together at the corners of one side image 1. Best of all this technique allows you to cut all parts of the joint with just a dado blade and a single setup on the tablesaw. This technique works extremely well for constructing drawers that will be mounted with mechanical drawer slides.