Drawer construction woes.

[Juicegoose]

Well guys this weekend I took on the task of building some shop drawers for these two base cabinets I built. I thought I had watched enough videos and learned enough tips and tricks to avoid anything tricky but I failed in one area which turned out to be kind of tricky waters.

First

When I had my sheet of ply whole, I made sure that I cut all my joinery(rabbits, dados) while the sheet was still in one piece.

Second

I made sure that all subsequent cuts I made were cut with the use of a stop block for accuracy and repeatability. Everything seemed to be going great. I had all my parts cut exactly the same and all of them laid out in a manor that eased construction.

Then the construction came and upon putting the drawers together I noticed they were slightly skewed(when measuring from the top of the drawer). This was not a worry as I had seen this sort of thing in several videos and articles. A clamp on the offending corners quickly pulled the drawer into square, or so I thought. Well after fitting the drawer slides onto the drawer i noticed a couple of the drawers seem to still be skewed. Not from the top mind you but from the bottom.

You see there were two things I failed to do.

1. I failed to measure and adjust the corner to corner distance of the drawer from the bottom of the drawer. This was much more crucial then the top. With my drawers being 11" deep the clamping I falsly thought was fixing the drawer was really only fixing the top edges.

2. I failed to use the square on the inside and outside of the drawer boxes to ensure squareness. An oversight on my part but again I thought i was doing good by having the opposite corners be the same measurement..big stupid head.

So now I have a couple drawers that slide rather ruggedly in and out of the cabinets and the worst part is the front face of the drawer isn't flat with the front of the cabinet which will cause a headache when I build my faces.

My solutions

1. Since the glue and screws are set I'm thinking I could try to clamp the bottom opposite corners and see if the drawer will move slightly back into square.

2. I could put the drawer on the tablesaw and shave off a little on one side. This will look like junk but will at least help fix the harshness of the drawer slides by removing some of the skewness <-- is that a word.

3. Rebuild the drawers. Don't want to do it as this was a "get rid of excess plywood pieces in the shop" project and I don't want to buy more ply. As a side note this project has cleared up the large pieces of ply from the shop but has left me with smaller cutoffs that i just can't get rid of. Somewhere i know I'll need just a little piece of wood and I'll be without if I throw it away. Awww the trials and tribulations of a woodworkers!

Regarding the faces

I know that if I were to simply mount the faces to the front faces of the skewed drawers that they would sit crooked in the cabinet. My solution was to put some wedge material behind the low side of the drawer front to bring the more inset side back flush with the cabinet face.

Will it look like trash from the inside? YES 100%! Will anyone notice but me or the occational neighbor No.

I hope my idiot mistakes help some other new guy to not make the same mistakes I did. Learn my brothers LEARN WELL!!!

Now are there any words of advice for fixing my situation with the skewed drawers?

[dryhter]

OK Juice,

I'll take a whack at this, since no one else has answered . Not knowing what tools you have to work with what your skill level is or what the heck you were trying to describe. Here goes.

Drawers seem like they should be so simple to make and yet they are not because there are so many little things that you can screw up that compound into big problems. As you have found out. Everyone will develop their own method for building something that method suites the way they think. Just keep that in mind. Here is what works for me, just like building a cabinet square and parallel is a must, a must in all three dimensions, Not too sure about your step one, sounds like trouble and I am pretty sure that is where the problem started.

1. Rip all your material to width (preferably on a table saw), make sure you start with a straight edge, keep it tight to the fence, and sight the piece after cutting, check the pieces against one another for anomalies. Don't move the fence until you have cut all the pieces for each size height of drawers.
2. Cut to length, don't move anything( stop blocks or fence ) until all cuts are completed for each group, check for square, check for anomalies, fix if required or at least take note
3. Machine, this is where we move into the third dimension, so far you have only been concerned about two dimensions. Sheet goods can very in thickness quite a bit in a short distance, .025 in. A drawer side might Mic, up at .708 on one side or edge and .730 on the other. And to compound that inconsistency, when you are machining you are not indexing off the side that you are trying to keep square and parallel
4. Square the bottom panel, the bottom only squares the bottom, just like a square back on a cabinet only squares the back, it has nothing to do with the front

Regardless how anybody chooses to build the key is accuracy.

Checking diagonals only works if each piece of the parallel sides are the exact same length.

Advice, do what you got to do to get them to work, then make them look good, don't screw up next time.

Dave

[Stampy]

When I built the cabinets and drawers for my shop I did so using a template that I could build the drawers around. The 3d template was made dimensionally square all around and so my machined parts that were all cut, as Dave suggests, came out square all around. I just built the drawers around the upside down template. This saved allot of fiddly squaring during assembly of each drawer.

The cabinet cases were built using 2 stop blocks on the inside of the case. The blocks were a 3/4 inch piece of plywood that was marked on all four edges and I made sure to use the same edge as a reference as I assembled the cases. This made for 2 separate cases that were identical.

Hope this helped

[Juicegoose]

Thanks for replies guys. I guess the main lesson in all of this is I need to make sure that I'm more carefull in the future regarding measurements(at least during assembly). I'm sure everyone makes mistakes at first but thats what we learn from right!!!