Drawers

The hall cabinet will hold all kinds of stuff and some of it would be best in drawers, so I included two drawers in the design. I decided to build the whole thing from plywood, but that's not turned out well for the drawers.

I thought making wooden drawer runners to work with plywood would be tricky, so I bought some drawer slides from Eurofit Direct. They are probably overkill but they work very well. I was very happy with Eurofit's delivery and cost but I received an unsolicited email from a recommendation company asking how I would rate Eurofit. I'm never happy with personal details being shared around other parties.

I thought I would build the drawers by making a box with dovetail joints on the front of the box and tongue-and-groove joints at the back. The front takes more strain as everytime the drawer is opened the weight of the drawer and its contents resists the pull on the front face. Dovetails are very strong so are widely used to join the drawer front to the sides. The bottom of the drawer will be 3mm ply fitted into a groove cut around all the sides of the box. To finish the drawer there will be a front panel screwed to the front of the box that will project around the sides, top and bottom. This will disguise the sliders when the drawer is closed.  The, yet to be bought, handle fixes to the front panel.

My attempts to make a plywood box with the joints cut failed badly. The plywood split and broke in various ways so I gave up. Instead I turned to some softwood that I already had and fashioned some drawers from that. It is rather chunky, well actually really rather too thick, but I now have two drawers. 

I cut the dovetails by hand. I have a router and a router table, but no dovetail jig. I came across a way of cutting the pins with a wooden jig on the router table and a straight cutting router bit, leaving the tails to be cut out by hand or with a band saw. I don't have a band saw (it's on my wish list) so I would still need to either cut the waste from the tails with chisel or saw it out with a coping saw. The boards are chunky (really thick) so I opted for a coping saw and finish with a chisel. 

The tongue-and-groove was easy with the router and the groove to hold the base was also easy with the router.  I also used the router to round over the top edge of the drawers. I'm happy with them so far.

Now I need to stain the drawers and build the frames to support them, including the top shelf. Then I think I'll see real progress.