Building Drawers And Cabinets

The 3 4 plywood case eliminates panel jointing planing and glue ups.

Building drawers and cabinets.

Attach the drawer slides to the drawer box and the cabinet frame. Wider shelves and drawers tend to bind or rack as you slide them in and out. Also i make all my drawers using plywood for the box and plywood for the bottom. For the sake of showing you how to build a simple cabinet drawer we ll be talking about attaching an overlay drawer front.

Inset drawers are more difficult because of the precision required to get perfect lines around the drawer front. How to use a kreg jig. Attach the drawer face leaving 1 8 gap on all sides using wood glue and finish nails and clamp it well. If you re using dimensional lumber you ll just go to first size that is under 1 of your opening.

Overlaps on the sides let you fine tune the cabinet width during installation. For this drawer my opening was 7 1 8 wide so i subtracted 1 1 8 and made my drawers 6 tall. Begin with the right cabinet dimensions. This means some extra building work and buying more slides but the smaller rollouts will operate more smoothly and easily.

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. I m building these drawers for my diy dresser. The word drawer followed by dados and dovetails is surly enough to scare off many a diyer. If the cabinet is more than 30 in.

Read this post to understand more about choosing inset or overlay doors. 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. Although i am using a kreg jig to build this drawer the basic principles are the same using any other joinery method. The sample base and wall cabinets shown below have these features to make building them as simple as possible.