Building Simple Cabinet Drawers

For the sake of showing you how to build a simple cabinet drawer we ll be talking about attaching an overlay drawer front.

Building simple cabinet drawers.

Face frames cover plywood edges. The word drawer followed by dados and dovetails is surly enough to scare off many a diyer. The sides and back of the drawer should be 1 2 or 5 8 thick. These diy drawers are quick to make are very strong and you can even make all the cuts with a circular saw.

How to build a sliding drawer using kreg jig. Assure they are level and mounted 1 4 above the bottom of the opening. Nonetheless there s an easier way to build a drawer without using a table saw or router yet results in a beautiful sturdy assembly just the same. Overlaps on the sides let you fine tune the cabinet width during installation.

If the drawer front are inset the draw box will need to be recessed the same depth as the thickness of the drawer front. You have to take into account the size of the drawer slides and decide the width accordingly. I am assuming you are using thick stock. Wider shelves and drawers tend to bind or rack as you slide them in and out.

Decide the dimensions of the drawer box. That s where i mount the next slide. The 3 4 plywood case eliminates panel jointing planing and glue ups. I ll show you how to build a drawer in 6 easy steps.

The sample base and wall cabinets shown below have these features to make building them as simple as possible. Building a drawer box using a kreg jig is very straightforward and easy. In general the drawer front should be 3 4 thick unless it s a drawer with a false front false front drawers are a simple drawer box with the front screwed to the box. Mount the drawer slides to the sides of the cabinet.

Inset drawers are more difficult because of the precision required to get perfect lines around the drawer front. If the cabinet is more than 30 in. Then i do the same for the next slide above it just add the two fronts below it plus an extra inch so 12 12 1 25. Then place a 1 4 shim along the bottom of the opening and set the drawer on it.

Read this post to understand more about choosing inset or overlay doors. Kreg tool is sponsoring this post and their pocket hole jig makes building these diy drawers an. Begin with the right cabinet dimensions. To make things easy and give me plenty of wiggle room i measure up from the bottom of the cabinet about 1 higher than that drawer front so 13.

This means some extra building work and buying more slides but the smaller rollouts will operate more smoothly and easily.