26 drawer building basics

In this video I want to give you the basics of drawer construction the way I

like to do it for kitchen cabinets. It's a fairly simple technique but it yields

drawers that are a pretty decent quality too. So first of all the drawer front

back and sides are made out of half-inch thick plywood. The ideal there is Baltic

birch plywood but you can also use birch veneered plywood. Now to hide the

laminations on the top there's some solid wood edging that's been glued

there. Notice too how the sides of the drawer box cap the ends of the front and

back so that when you're looking at the side of the drawer you don't see these

end pieces all you see is a piece of solid wood. In the illustration here

there's some finishing nails shown. If you wanted something a little neater

you could use glue and some 23 gauge pins that would create a nearly

invisible joint there. Now the bottom in this design is quarter-inch thick

plywood and that plywood is in a groove that's about a quarter of an inch up

from the bottom of the drawer box. The face is added later. There's four screws

that hold on the face and wood screws flathead wood screws with cup washers do

a very good job so the cup washer and screw head is visible from the inside

Now a drawer like this is going to be fairly strong but not necessarily as

rigid as you want it to be. There may be a tendency for that drawer to rack a

little bit from side to side and in order to eliminate that we need to look

at the bottom here and there's a technique that that works very well and

it makes use of the rigidity of the bottom panel. So once you've squared your

drawer up after assembly then flip it over and apply a bead of ordinary wood

glue in a kind of a fillet pattern all around the inside of the underside of

the drawer. So you can see there there's the the drawer bottom here and then

there's a little ledge where the bottom is raised up from the bottom edge. That's

where your glue goes. It's kind of like a welding fillet in a way. You apply it

right to the corner all the way around and when that dries it locks the drawer

together perfectly rigidly so there's no moving it there's no racking. You just

have to be sure that your drawer is perfectly squared up before you set it

aside to let that glue to let that glue dry. So this is what it looks like in

real life. Just start by applying a bead of glue here in the corner and then just

smear it with your finger and that's going to lock the bottom to the sides

Now if the bottom was fully held by the groove that it fits in you wouldn't need

to do this but there's usually a little bit of movement and this glue fillet

that you see here locks that so now the whole drawer becomes rigid because of

the rigidity of the bottom panel