Drawer Making

I started working on drawers a few weeks back and have been picking away at them since. I keep getting side-tracked by other things but I'm pretty much done now - I just have to put a quick coat of finish on them.

I don't like lower cabinets, because I hate bending over or getting on my knees trying to rescue something from the depths of the cabinet. Instead I built lower drawers, 24 of them, including a large drawer that a trash can will fit inside. I used baltic birch plywood for all the drawers, 1/2" for the smaller drawers and 5/8" for the larger ones, although I think now that 5/8" was a bit of overkill. I built the drawers in three batches. The first was the upper drawers, then the larger second and third row, and finally the remaining 5 in the island. The picture above is the last batch, all cut to size and ready for joinery.

I looked around for quick & strong drawer joinery and finally settled on a 'groove & rabbett' joint because it was simple, quick, and if oriented properly and tightly fit I'm sure it'll be very strong. Especially with a high-quality material like baltic birch ply. I don't think it would be very strong with solid wood because of the short grain the joint would cause. Also, I'm not sure it would work great with domestic plywood because the plys are so thick. The bit of holding wood left after the groove is cut might want to tear off if the joint is too tight.


First I cut the groove. On the first run of drawers I used my router table but I had inconsistent results with each test joint I cut (for some reason) so I switched to the dado blade. It worked more consistently but I had to scribe each cut to prevent tear out.


For Euro-style bottom mount slides the drawer bottom must be captured which adds another step into the drawer construction. I made sure to reference the fence to the top side of the drawer so that the top was all flush during glue-up. It means that I had to re-setup for every different drawer height but it made for less clean up after glue up.

I cut the rabbett last, using a sacrifical fence.

The final joint, ready for glue-up. When I had the joints together and the drawer box square I shot 3 or 4 crown molding staples through the joint for some added security. Like I said, I'm just a CNC router and a drinking porblem away from being a production cabinetmaker!