Build Drawers With Slides the Easy Way
Drawers, they are a pain to make. Why? Because they have to be precise. A non-square drawer won’t fit, a drawer a little to big or small won’t fit. The slides have to line up perfectly otherwise the drawers won’t slide. There’s a lot that can go wrong, but I’ve learned that the real problem all along has been me. I get in the way and overthink when I should let the drawer do the work. Here’s what I mean.
I’m working on a shop cabinet and I want it to be all drawers. While I don’t like making drawers, I do like the utility of drawers. Stuff can’t get lost in the back of a drawer like it can in a cabinet.
Create Your Plan
The first step unfortunately involves math. I had to figure out how many drawers I could fit. I measured the opening, which was 25 1/2 inches tall. I didn’t want these drawers to be too deep, so I opted for four drawers. I removed half an inch from each drawer to give them a little breathing room, which left me with 23 1/2 inches total. I wanted to keep the math simple, so I decided to go with 3 drawer boxes of 5 1/2 inches and one, not at 7 but at 6 1/2 which gives me a little extra wiggle room. It’s better to have the drawer boxes slightly shorter than they could be and fit with some extra spacing in between them than oversized. Plus you want the drawers spaced out so they don’t rub against each other anyway.
The end result of my math. Perfectly spaced, tall boxes for maximum capacity to contain all my stuff.
Now to figure out the size of the boxes. I’m going with 1/2 plywood here. I like 1/2 for drawers because it isn’t too bulky but is nice and strong. I knew the depth of the cabinet was 14 inches. I always want the boxes to have the sides be the longest parts, with the front and back sandwiched in between. It’s important to do it this way so you use the strength of your joinery to keep the drawer together. As you pull a drawer, the force is back to front. If you secure the drawer together with nails then every time you pull the drawer open you would be pulling the nail those nails out. If your nails go in from the sides, then when you pull you cannot pull the drawer apart without breaking those nails in half.
So I know the sides are 14 inches, but the front and back are trickier. There is an easy way and a hard way to figure out their length. The hard way is to measure the opening width, then subtract the width of the sides and the width of the drawer slides. In my case the width is 16 3/4 inches, minus 1 inch for the two half inch plywood sides, minus 1 inch for the two drawer slides equals 14 3/4s.
Or, you can do it the easy way but putting two pieces of ply and your drawer slides in the opening and measure the remaining gap. I know, subtracting 2 from 16 isn’t difficult, but it’s easy to mess up and keep 16 in your head, cutting all your boards 2 inches too long, only to find out when you try to put the drawer in place that it doesn’t fit and you have to redo them.
Cut and Assemble
Now that you know how big your boxes need to be you can start cutting. I like to figure out all my sizes first so I know how much material I need. In this case I had the perfect amount of scrap laying around, which I ripped to the height of my boxes, added a groove for the bottom panel, and moved to the miter saw to cut to the needed lengths using a stop block for consistency (an essential skill which you can read more about here).
With your materials ready, put them all together by gluing one end in the middle of your sides, brad nail them in place, slide in the plywood bottom, glue and nail in the back, and repeat. Check for square, just in case, and if out then use some clamps to bring them back in line.
Drawer Slides
Now is the hardest part, installing the drawer slides so everything lines up. What you don’t want to do is measure. Sounds strange, but measuring will only lead to you getting something out of alignment.
Instead, grab some scrap 1/2 plywood and use that as a spacer. I start with the drawer boxes, put a piece of scrap next to your drawer. Then take the interior out of the drawer slide and put that on top. Install the drawer slide component with the given screws and you now have a perfectly level slide, spaced 1/2 above the bottom, giving you space for the mating piece once installed where the entire slide including the portion mounted to the inside cabinet wall would line up perfectly with the bottom of the drawer.
Spaced up half an inch to accommodate it’s better half.
Installing the cabinet mounted slide components is a little trickier. I like to start at the bottom and again, grab some scrap ply and use it to hold up your drawer slide. This time I opted for two pieces, the same 1/2 piece from earlier and a 1/4 piece offcut from the drawer bottom which allowed for clearance over the bottom face frame for the drawer to slide unencumbered.
Once I had the first drawer done, I installed it and used it to figure out my spacing between the drawers. I knew I could put 1/2 inches between the drawers so I took a 1/2 piece of plywood to put on the installed drawer for perfect spacing.
This method is nice because there is no measuring involved, after you figure out your drawer height and spacing of course. By using scrap pieces you cannot mess up because you have a physical stop giving you the correct spacing and ensuring each of the slides is perfectly level front to back and the opposite side is parallel.
Drawer Faces
The last step was to cover it all up. So I cut a piece of plywood to fit my opening with 1/8 inch spacing all the way around and put it into place where I was able to mark where I needed to make each cut. As I removed the plywood I labeled each box and corresponding face so I kept the grain match. Using the table saw, I ripped each drawer face to the correct width and they were ready for install. I used some spacers to achieve a perfect 1/8 gap all the way around and in between the drawers and clamped them in place so I could, then coming back with two screws from the inside.
The last, unnecessary detail for shop furniture was the addition of homemade drawer pulls. Initially my plan was to drill a large hole in the drawer to use as a pull, but I decided to use up a scrap piece of red oak to create custom pulls.
If you’re interested in seeing the whole build, check out the YouTube video I made showing you the build process.