Building Cabinet Drawers

A whole lot of making installing and building drawers is making sure things are lined up and square.

Building cabinet drawers.

Begin with the right cabinet dimensions. Wide consider installing two narrower rollouts side by side rather than a single wide one. If the cabinet is more than 30 in. The sample base and wall cabinets shown below have these features to make building them as simple as possible.

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. In wood magazine torture tests this drawer joint proved stronger than even dovetails. This technique works extremely well for constructing drawers that will be mounted with mechanical drawer slides. Building drawers are almost like a rite of passage going from beginner woodworker to more intermediate woodworker.

When you follow these instructions you ll end up with an inset drawer that has a perfect 1 2 wide space for a drawer slide. Face frames cover plywood edges. My journey learning to build drawers the very first time i built a drawer was for this x leg accent. 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. Also i make all my drawers using plywood for the box and plywood for the bottom. Sliding dovetails aren t just for building bookcases. 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. But i don t try to stay away from them anymore. Overlaps on the sides let you fine tune the cabinet width during installation. 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.

We ll be using 1 2 cabinet grade plywood for all parts of these drawers including the bottoms. 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. Most traditional side mounted drawer slides require 1 2 clearance on each side of the drawer. Let s stick with those since it makes sizing your drawer super.