Need to make about 40 drawers - most efficient way?

[Cygnus A]

I am building cabinets for the wife's craft room and will need about 40 drawers. I am using ball bearing drawer slides so width accuracy is important. The drawers are about 23 inches deep and 26 inches wide, with various heights (3 inch to 8 inch). I plan to use 1/2 inch birch for all of parts of the drawer except the false fronts. What are some efficient ways to knock these out while maintaining quality ?

I made some drawers for my router table as a test. I dadoed the bottom into the sides/front/back which seemed to work OK. The birch veneers didn't hold up super great and I had occasional tear out. Would Baltic birch be a better choice here ?

[Tom King]

Quality on anything else is so hit, or miss, that I'd use BB.  The edges finish nicely too.

[drzaius]

BB here as well. But watch that it's the real thing, cause it seems like lots of places call it BB even though it's just cheap standard birch face veneer ply.

[Cygnus A]

OK BB it is. Buy what about construction? Should I dado everything to keep it square? Or just dado the drawer bottoms? Should the drawer bottoms be glued in for strength or keep them loose ? Dados? Rabbits? Butt joints?

So many ways to build drawers

[Woodenskye]

I would do a search on YouTube for Ron Paulk.  He does a lot of drawers for his tool trailers and comes up with jigs for mass production.  I wouldn't get real fancy with the joinery, butt joints, glue and Brad nails for the boxes.  The bottoms I would also just nail on.  Cut all parts at the same time, so if you have 10 at 4", 10 at 6" etc, cut all 10 without changing your set up, this also applies to doing a dado for the bottoms if that's what you want.

[Eric.]

For simple but strong plywood boxes is hard to beat a locking rabbet.  You can do it on the table saw or with a router bit.  I know Freud makes one.  But I'd just do it at the table saw.

[sheperd80]

Id say use brad nails and glue if youre not going for super fine cabinetry. At the quantity youre doing it could be a huge time saver. Make a simple square-up jig to keep parts square while nailing and youll fly through em.

 

I just did about 20 drawers for a customers home with locking rabbets and dadoed in bottoms. It went pretty fast because once i setup the tools the parts batched out quickly. The locking rabbets and dados make glue up pretty easy, needing only a few clamps per drawer. But at 40 drawers this may slow you down significantly.

 

I used premade drawer-side material from my hardwood dealer. Its prefinished white birch, which comes 12" or 8" wide with 2 finished edges. In most cases you can rip the strips in half for 2 pieces with a finished top edge. It makes a pretty nice cabinet grade drawer and saves alot of time.

 

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