10x your tool storage with this one simple build

this is a tool that needs a home and here we have four empty drawers except sadly this tool isn't going to fit in any of these these top two drawers are only 1 in deep and these two are only 2 in deep I mean come on who designs these things and what do they think we're storing in here comic books pancakes flounder almost every tool store sells a chest or work bench like this and they all suffer from the same big or should I say small problem most of these drawers are just way too shallow to be of any practical use you see these aren't really designed for Woodworkers they're more targeted toward shade tree mechanics and home diyers but what if I told you I figured out a way to turn these four skinny impractical unusable drawers into the 10 in of actual usable space let's talk about it now before you run off thinking you can just slap together a drawer stick it in here and call it done think again there are some tricks to getting this to work properly and a few pitfalls to avoid but don't worry I'm going to tell you the whole story of how I built this start to finish this is an easy afternoon build that anyone can do even if you've never built a drawer in your life if you follow what I did in the correct order you shouldn't have any trouble the first thing I did was to remove one of the existing drawers and carefully measure its outside dimensions this drawer is 15 and 316 wide by 21 and 78 long when you're building the new drawer the trick is to make it a/ in narrower so 14 and 11/16 stick with me here I'll show you the reason for that in just a minute next I remove the rest of the drawers and measured from the bottom of the lowest slide to the top of the highest one that would give me the minimum depth I would need to fill this space that distance was n and a half inches I decided to give myself a bit of wiggle room and went with 9 and 3/4 so then I had all three dimensions for the replacement drawer I started with a sheet of/ in Baltic birch plywood there's really no need to go with anything thicker than half an inch in my opinion I probably could have gone with any kind of sheet Goods here but I did want something that would be flat and dimensionally stable with this build I knew that Precision would be important and that any wood movement would mean the drawers would be likely to stick and I definitely don't want to be dealing with that there are lots of construction techniques when it comes to drawers but since I was planning to paint this I figured there was really no need to get fancy simple rabbits for something like this is more than good enough dovetails or drawer lock bits are fun but they wouldn't add any strength or stability to this in any way when building a drawer I usually like to cut the rabbits into the sides which ensures the seam will be covered by the drawer face however in this case I was much more concerned with maintaining Precision in regards to the width and I figured it would be a bit easier if I started with the front and back cut out to the precise Dimensions I had already determined I cut the front and back to the overall width and depth I had measured earlier then I laid out the sides the height was of course 9 and 3/4 in same as the front and back I determined the length by taking the outside Dimension I had measured earlier and subtracting the depth of the front and back rabbits so that's 21 and 38 in the length of the drawer isn't really as critical here I was just shooting for close enough for the bottom I used Doos to inset that so to get the width I needed I subtracted the thickness of the plywood from the overall width and of course I cut the length the same as the sides you can cut rabbits and Doos any number of ways using a router table or with multiple passes on a table saw I like to use a d stack a so-called halfin sheet of plywood is always going to be a bit thinner than that so I used an offcut to build the stack to the exact size I needed I used the same offcut to set the blade height I wanted to go half the thickness of the plywood which is actually 1564 of an inch yeah I'm not measuring that up out so I just set this by eye once I had all my parts cut to size I did a quick dry assembly to make sure everything fit then I glued it up if you're enjoying this video you don't have to like you don't even have to subscribe but you should thank the folks at flexispot because I couldn't have done it without them the flexispot C7 is a premium ergonomic office chair that gets me through even the longest Marathon editing session this was my old chair and it was a five out of five on the sore butt scale the C7 has a self-adaptive lumbar support that adjusts to changes in my posture to ensure my back is always supported and everything on this chair is adjustable I mean everything the headrest the arms the seat the height the recline position it's designed for all Heights from 54 to 62 and supports up to 300 lb with a 10-year warranty and 30-day free returns you've got nothing to lose except this check the link in the description and use code c730 to get a $30 discount on the flexispot C7 premium ergonomic office chair there's never been a better time to buy The Next Step was to select draw slides now this can actually get a little tricky so I needed to be careful of course I'm keeping the existing outside slides these are already installed so I needed to find new inside Runners that would make to these drawer slides like Lumber are sold in nominal sizes the slides I have are 21 1/2 in which is actually the length of a standard 22-in slide you can just measure your existing slides and kick that up to the nearest even number to get the nominal size the next decision was to determine how many slides I would need and where to place them I'm spanning four drawers here so that gave me a number of options I certainly don't need to mate all four of these slides but for a 10-in deep drawer a single slide doesn't really work either just two unstable after a bit of experimentation I found the best placement was one at the bottom and one at the top most of these metal chests will have full extension drawer slides some like this one have soft close slides I definitely wanted to keep that soft close feature so I had to select my Hardware accordingly my first thought was to take the slides from the drawers I had just removed and reuse them I decided against that since I wasn't sure this whole crazy idea would even work and while these pop rivets are easy enough to drill out and remove they'd be a pain to reinstall if I decided to scrap the whole idea and go back to the original configuration my next idea was to check if they sold OEM replacements for these original slides it turns out they don't and they probably don't for yours either these are usually sourced in bulk from the lowest bidder and they often use different suppliers between manufacturing runs so finding exact replacement slides for these didn't work out for me finally I examined the OEM Hardware to try to find slides at retail that would work Home Depot sells a brand called everbilt that has a 22in soft close slide that comes real close to these what you have to look for is the style and placement of the release lever and for a soft close slide this catch hook on the end you can see the release levers on these two slides are identical the placement is the same and this catch Hook is close enough to the original that it should be fine so I bought a pair tried them out and they seem to work okay so I went with these the good news is if you're installing two sets you only need the soft close feature for the bottom pair the top pair is just for alignment and support so I just use plain vanilla slides there you don't even need the release levers on those I just drilled those out and threw them away so now let me show you why I made this drawer a/ in narrower than the originals here I've taken a piece of scrap and screwed the slides straight into it you'll see that these two empty Runners rub against the side and that is not good so I built my new drawer to provide a/4 in of clearance on each side then I took a couple scraps of/ Quin hardboard and cut them for shims I used double-sided tape to fasten them temporarily to the drawer then marked where the slides would go because of these shims the stock screws that came with the new hardware would be too short so I replaced those with 3/4 in number six screws finally it was time to test fit everything with a little convincing I got it all together and it looked like it was actually going to work I measured the width of an existing drawer front that way was exactly 16 in leaving about a 16th of an inch gap on each side the height I needed to cover was 10 and 5/8 in so that meant making the front 10 1/2 in tall I always cut drawer fronts a tiny bit proud and stink up on the final Dimensions just to be sure since board stretchers aren't a thing it's always easier to cut wood down to size than the other way around here's a good tip a standard index card is 164 of an inch thick so four of these stacked together makes a handy 16 in shim I trimmed a/4 in off the top Edge because I had a fancy plan for the drawer handle for the finishing touch I added a 16inch roundover to the bottom and both sides I wanted to see if I could match the look of the remaining drawers so I measured the size of these handles and got to work figuring out how to replicate them this is the horrible drawing of my plan I started with it inch and 1/2 block of popler cut it to length 16 in ripped one side lengthwise down to an inch then cut a big Notch out of it like this I took this over to the router table and put a/4 in round over on the two front edges okay so that was looking pretty good next came the final step the drawers on this are powdercoated black I certainly wasn't going to take this in to have it powder coated but I thought this Rustoleum textured paint might be a pretty convincing substitute I figured upon close inspection the r probably wouldn't hold up but at a quick glance in the right light if you squint hard enough I might just pull it off the handles have a gloss finish but I had that covered too once the paint was dry I glued the handle on reinstalled the slides and hoped for the best and I've got to be honest this experiment turned out better than I could have ever hoped for I have way more room for way more stuff and check that finish that looks really really convincing to me so now the big question will this fit o look at that nice I firmly believe that in your shop much like in life you don't have to put up with the way things are there's no problem you can't solve with a little bit of effort and Ingenuity and that gives you the power to change things to make things work for you to just make things better I'm Lee from busted knuckle Woodworks until next time adios amigos

Channel: Busted Knuckle Woodworks

Views: 85,944

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Id: vNsoW5Kb0ec

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2024