Build cabinets the easy way || How to Make Drawers

this video was sponsored by policy genius well hey in this week's video i'm going to show you a continuation of kind of last week's video where i built this coffee table but what i didn't show you is exactly how i made these solid wood drawers and drawer slides it's not that hard no fancy box joints or hand cut dovetails just really simple easy nice looking solid wood drawers so follow along check the video description for links to all the products and that and let me just say right now if you're not signed up for my patreon you're missing out it's like a giant party over there just one big backstage pass all sorts of bonus content weekly question and answers you get ad free youtube videos you get coupon codes to my website i mean go sign up the links in the video description come on but most importantly enjoy the video [Music] so if you watched my previous video you know i just made this coffee table but what you also know is i didn't show you how i made the drawer as you can see there's this big hole here and we gotta fill it with something so why not a drawer to hold delectable bottles of spirits i start by thumbing through all the scrap pieces i have left over from the rest of the coffee table now fortunately enough i think i'm gonna have enough pieces here to piece together two drawers which is a good thing because right now black walnut costs an arm and a leg and i will need both an arm and a leg in order to complete these drawers now i'm building these drawers for a specific purpose and that's to hold bottles of liquor so it was important that i measured some bottles of liquor and try and come up with somewhat of an average size to determine how big i need to build this drawer or rather how many bottles i can fit in each drawer so i got out some digital calipers and i started feeling around to see kind of what the consistency was here once i had a better idea of the exact size of drawer we needed to make as far as the height goes i went over and started ripping pieces down to a consistent width on the table saw next i went over to that gaping hole in my coffee table and i measured the distance from the back to the front to determine how long the sides of our drawers need to be keeping in mind that they are gonna also have a drawer face that's about three quarters of an inch once i determined the size i was going for i set up a stop block on my miter saw fence and i started cutting down drawer sides drawer sides not to be confused with drawer slides we'll get to that later but for now once i got all my drawer sides cut i grabbed a quarter inch setup block and i wedged it between each drawer side right up against the outside edge of my opening the reason for this is because i don't want the drawer to be tight in there i want to leave a quarter inch gap on either side so that we can make our drawer slides work properly then i measured the distance between those two boards and went back over to the miter saw and cut down the pieces for the front and back of my drawer box after i got all these pieces cut i took one piece back over and just double checked that it would fit in between those two outer side pieces i wanted a nice snug fit but not too snug not like your christmas sweater in january think of it like your christmas sweater in october before you put on the holiday weight with all the pieces cut for our drawer box i next need to cut the panels for the bottom of each drawer for this i decided to do a little bit of a contrast and use quarter inch white oak plywood but in order to hold that plywood i needed to cut a groove on the bottom of each one of my drawer box pieces whenever i'm cutting a groove on the table saw and not using a dado for the correct thickness meaning i have to make multiple passes i like to also cut a groove in a scrap piece that way when i go to make my second pass and bring that groove up to a quarter of an inch i can use the scrap piece and test the fit on my bottom panel material before i cut all my actual pieces with that fitting just the way i want it i go back over to the table saw and i run all my pieces through a second time bringing that groove up to a quarter of an inch which will be just right for that bottom panel with all the grooves cut in all of our pieces things are starting to look very drawish around here but we still of course need to actually cut the panels for the bottom of each drawer so i simply rip those down to the right width over on the table saw and then cut them down to the right size on the chop saw easy peasy lemon squeezy now with all the main components cut for my drawers i fit everything together just to make sure that my panel's not too big and that all my sides are even and everything's gonna come out nice and perfect which it does because this is tv and i can make all my mistakes when the camera is not rolling so how do you like that with everything roughly fit together i started throwing bottles of alcohol in there like i was a prohibition agent in the 1920s or something like that really i just wanted to determine how many bottles i'd be able to fit and i figured that i'd easily be able to hold five bottles in each drawer but now i had to do something i hate and that was try and do some math which is never any fun and i recommend avoiding at all costs but sometimes you just can't avoid it like right now i was trying to figure out if i use a half inch divider in between each bottle how big could each individual slot be after doing that pesky math i determined that each individual slot can be exactly four and five thirty seconds so i cut down the scrap piece of ply to exactly four and five thirty seconds and then to test my math i took a half inch setup block which would be the same thickness as the dividers and i just slowly walked across my drawer piece hopefully when i get to the end of this my little scrap piece of ply will be exactly even with the end of my drawer piece we'll see how good my math actually is and what do you know perfect fit well i mean you just got to take my word for it you can't really tell from that angle but believe me it was a perfect fit next i needed to cut some dados into the front and back of my drawer to create a slot to slide in those half inch dividers so i went over to the dado saw and i changed out the blade to a half inch i cut a test piece and used a half inch setup block to make sure it fit nice and snug which it did as you can see here and then i grab my rockler crosscut sled and i raised the blade to just at a quarter of an inch don't need to go too deep then again using that scrap piece of ply that i measured out earlier i use it to set the distance from my fence to the edge of my blade and determine exactly where i need to cut my first slot now this is easy because the slots are going to be identical on both ends of the board so i start out by cutting a slot on one side nice and easy and then when that's done i just take the piece i show the camera that there's a slot there oh wait i'm gonna do another piece i forgot i was doing two at once okay i take that piece yes i send that one through just like before okay good don't hit your other piece when you bring it back that was close all right now i got two slots now like i was saying because it's identical on the other side now we can just flip the pieces around and cut another slot on the other end just like this then once i have those slots cut on either end of my drawer pieces i now take my scrap 4 and 5 32nd piece once again and use that to measure over from the edge of that slot i put a mark on the front of the drawer face and then i move the fence over so that my next slot starts right on the edge of that mark and then you probably guessed what happens next i run all the pieces back through the dado saw putting yet again another half inch groove and once again you just flip it around to the other side and this should evenly space all your grooves out nice and clean uh like that but let's test and just double check this should fit perfectly in between each groove yes yes yes yes all right things are looking good so we just continue this process with all of our drawer pieces the fronts and the backs until we got nice half inch grooves cut everywhere we want nice half inch grooves and it looks something like this next we gotta finally start trying to figure out how we're gonna join these drawers together because we can't just glue them together and we can't nail them together like we would plywood drawers and we want them to look fancy because this is a nice piece of furniture but we definitely don't want to waste our time cutting dovetails ain't nobody wants to do that so i decided to use custom dowel pins to hook all of these together so i start by marking the end of each drawer side piece the thickness of the actual stock i'm using next i wanted to determine exactly where i want my dowel pins to land so i just brought them a half inch in from each side and then i plopped one smack dab in the middle for this application it's really important that you have one right in the middle and i'll show you why here in a little bit it just is going to look a lot nicer then after i get those marked i find the center on all of those marks and it looks something like this next we need to pre-drill all these holes for our dowels so i took each piece over to the drill press and using a 3 8 inch forstner bit i just started drilling holes on my predetermined marks now i will note i'm not drilling all the way through i'm just drilling in about a half inch this will allow us to easily start our drill bit when we drill all the way through into our other drawer pieces and make a nice crisp clean edge that we can fill with a dowel i'll show you what i'm talking about here in a little bit just hold on to your tootsies hold on to your tootsies who even talks like that but anyways your drawer sides should look something like this next i took them back over and i don't know why but i stuck it back on the drawer box i guess just to see how things looked but this was completely unnecessary but what is necessary is to sand the interior of all your drawer pieces before you hook your drawer together believe me this is a step you're not going to want to miss nothing is a bigger pain than trying to sand the inside of an already put together box it's no fun and i don't recommend it for anybody so just take the time to sand all the inside pieces before you hook them together with all of our inside pieces sanded now it was time to glue everything up you might be thinking hold on glue everything up you haven't even made dowels or inserted them how are you ready to glue this thing up that's crazy well no actually it's going to be so much easier to put this together with dowels if we just glue it up beforehand now is this a strong enough glue joint for the drawer to actually survive no it's not it's end grain to face grain and that's not ideal but it is strong enough to just stay put while we put our dowels in place so take the time glue everything up make sure it's nice and square exactly how you want the drawer to be and that way you're not going to deal with a bunch of pieces flopping around and falling over while you try and drill holes and insert some dowels so just go with it man it's groovy pretty soon i had both of my drawer boxes all glued up and they looked something like this next i needed dowels but i didn't have any 3 8 dowels and i wanted to do white oak dowels to match the white oak bottom in the drawer so when you don't have them you just make them i started by drilling a 3 8 inch hole through a piece of 1 8 inch steel for this i just used some angle iron i had laying around my shop once you drill a 3 8 inch hole into a piece of metal next i took some white oak scrap like this and i went over to my planer and i planed it down to a square a square that was just a wisp over 3 8 of an inch i mean just barely over just like like i'll show you just like this much over see just a tiny little bit i mean you don't want it under are you understanding you want it just over then because i just made one long piece of stock i went over to my miter saw and i chopped it into some more manageable pieces they don't have to be any exact length just smaller because we're going to shove these in the end of a drill in a second but before we do that i went over to my oscillating bench top belt sander and i just shaved a little bit off of each one kind of like you're sharpening a pencil until it looks something like that i did this to each piece until each piece looked pencil-like but we're not done yet then i did the same thing to the other side but this time i wanted it to look less pencil like and more drill bit like basically i just needed to shrink it down small enough that i could slide it into my battery powered drill something like this and now we are ready to make our custom white oak dowels all we do is take that piece of metal that we drilled a hole in we chalk up a piece of this white oak into a battery-powered drill or a corded drill if you're an old guy and yeah just drill it through your 3 8 inch hole this is literally putting a square peg into a round hole but that square peg comes out round after going through that hole thus creating a nice white oak dowel that is exactly 3 8 inch which hey that's the same size hole we drilled in those drawers earlier man that worked out great now i know at this point you probably get the picture and understand how to do this but i'm going to show you a little more dowel footage because it's kind of just fun to watch i mean you're literally making your own round stick thingies i mean i think that's cool you can just double tap and fast forward through this part if you don't want to see it but my guess is you're going to stick around and watch it because it's a whole heck of a lot of fun once i had enough dowel pieces cut i went over to my miter saw and chopped them down to right around an inch and three quarter which was just about oh half inch longer than i actually needed them and with that we are ready to hook these drawers together with our custom white oak dowels hey this video is sponsored by policy genius now i don't know about you but finding life insurance isn't always the most fun thing to do but it's super important for me personally is very important my wife recently decided that she wanted to stop working and focus on being a mom which is great but it meant that i'm the only income supporting my household now so if something happens to me well i want my family to be taken care of so i wanted to make sure that i could find a great life insurance policy that can be a daunting task but that's where policy genius comes in and makes it super simple let me show you exactly how that works when you go to policy genius in minutes you can work out how much life insurance coverage you need and compare personalized quotes to find your best price you can save 50 or more on life insurance by comparing quotes with policy genius their licensed experts will help you understand your options and ensure you apply for the right policy policy genius works for you not the insurance companies so you can trust them to offer unbiased advice and help you navigate every step of the shopping and buying process now you might be wondering okay where do i go from here how do i sign up well that part is insanely easy all you got to do is this getting started is easy click the link in the description or head to policygenius.com bourbon moth that's it policy genius when it comes to insurance it's nice to get it right with all of our dowel pieces cut it was time to take our drawer boxes out of clamps next i removed that 3 8 inch forstner bit out of the drill press and i put a little piece of tape on it marking it right at an inch and a half remember our dowel pieces are roughly an inch and three quarters and then i just went to town continuing the same holes we pre-drilled through our drawer sides and into either our drawer fronts or backs depending on what side you're working on at what time as you can see you want to go nice and slow at the beginning so that you don't get any tear out that's what those pre-drilled holes were for and you just drill all the way down until you hit your tape and pull out a bunch of smoke and sawdust it's actually pretty darn fun and satisfying and i recommend it to anybody trying to find a good way to fill a saturday night now there's no reason you can't do this on a drill press if you got a free standing drill press with a wide enough mouth but since mine's a bench top one i just couldn't fit the drawer underneath it so i had to do it by hand but it worked and in the end i got all my holes drilled out and now i was ready to slather some glue onto our pre-cut dowels and hammer them home this really takes you back to those little toys you had when you were a kid that your parents would give you that would keep you busy for hours because you'd hammer all the pegs in one side and then flip it over just to realize that you had a hammer the ones in on that side too and then you'd flip it over and realize that the ones on the other side came loose so you had to hammer those back in and then you know you just went back and forth forever but it was fun and it taught hammer basics which is important after i got all of my dowels seated in there with a good amount of glue i took a wet paper towel and wiped down all the excess glue the main reason for this is because i'm about to flush cut these and i didn't want to get glue all over my saw to flush cut them i just used a japanese pole saw and went nice and slow and bad zip zap zoop it is cut and ready to be sanded this is where it really starts to come to life now you can't see it as good now because the end grain on the oak blends in a little bit with the walnut but once we put finish on those dowels they will pop out and look like a million bucks and in no time i had all of my dowels in place flush cut and sanded and now it was time to cut all of the pieces for our internal dividers so i milled down a bunch of stock to exactly half an inch thick and started ripping it down to the same height as the internal sides of my drawer box and i went over to the miter saw set up a stop block and cut all the pieces the length and just slid them in place now i'm going to pull these back out when i finish them because i'm not even going to glue these in they're just going to be friction fit i figure that way if i ever wanted to store something bigger in the drawer i'd always have the option to pull one or multiple of these dividers out and give myself a bigger drawer space but for now i'm just trying to double check and make sure everything fits and most importantly that my widest bottle will still fit in here which is this bottle of bullet rye and it fits so we're good everything else should fit no problem with our drawer completely constructed it was finally time to start working on our drawer slides notice i'm saying slides now and not drawer sides i see where that could be confusing so the first thing i needed to do was to cut a half inch deep groove on both sides of my drawer boxes this is what's going to allow my box to rest on my wood drawer slide i wanted this slot to be about one inch wide so leaving my half inch dado blade in place i ran it through once and then flipped it around and ran it through again the other benefit to doing it this way is you know that that groove is dead center in the middle of your drawer side also this is a good time to note that remember how i said you want to get that dowel perfectly centered on that drawer side piece well yeah it's so that it perfectly lines up in the center of that groove and looks nice not all wonkified and uneven so i just started cutting like a madman until i had grooves cutting all four sides of my drawer boxes as you can see we got our nice groove down the middle a dowel on each side and that dowel right in the middle this will need a little more sanding but it's looking pretty good next i took a ruler and i measured just to see the actual width of that groove as you can see it's about a sixteenth shy of one inch so i went over to the table saw and i cut a few pieces of scrap down to just under that size i mean barely under that size just enough that it'll slide smoothly in there without being wedged in place as you can see here once i had a nice fit and it was running smoothly in that track just like this i next needed to shrink down the thickness of this piece so that it would fit in the carcass of my coffee table so i went over to the planer and i planed a couple pieces down to exactly three quarters of an inch why three quarters of an inch you ask well remember our groove is a half inch deep and we already spaced the drawers out with a quarter of an inch on either side for the cabinet so by making this piece three quarters of an inch it should in theory fit perfectly inside of our cabinet just how it's supposed to so i cut a couple pieces down to the right length and i walked over to the coffee table to see if i got everything measured correctly and yes i did the key here is to have a nice fit not too tight but definitely not too loose just right so that it slides easily but isn't wedged in place and i hopefully accomplish that here then i don't know why but i cut a little back bevel on the front of each one of my wooden drawer slide pieces in my head i thought maybe this would just make it easier to get the drawer on and off the tracks it was probably completely unnecessary but it does look a little nicer then i marked out and pre-drilled with that same 3 8 inch forstner bit just a few countersunk holes these are just going to be locations that i can put some screws in and screw my drawer slides in place speaking of which it is time to screw my drawer slides in place so i just cut a few scrap pieces of ply that will allow me to rest the drawer slide on top of and get the right spacing these are just big enough to give me a quarter of an inch underneath the drawer itself which is plenty to eliminate any rubbing or dragging on the bottom of the coffee table once it's set firmly with a little glue on top of that spacer piece i pre-drill a few pilot holes and send in three one inch screws to hold that drawer slide nice and secure against the outside of the coffee table then once i have both my drawer slides screwed in place i went and got my drawer box and i slid it on there to see if it worked and it yeah it works [Music] nice fancy and then i went over to the other side of the coffee table and i did the exact same thing over there because the kind of a mirror image of themselves and what do you know that drawer slid in just as well as the other one things are looking up i mean not that things were ever looking down but they could have been if i had forgotten this next step which was to create some sort of system to keep the drawer from coming all the way out and landing on someone's toe or worse breaking a bottle of whiskey so for this i just simply grabbed a piece of pretty thick leather and i figured i'd screw one end to the back of the drawer and the other end the back of the cabinet and boom i got a little stop that'll keep my drawer from coming all the way out now if this had an upper drawer or a face frame i could put a little flip up piece of wood on the back but it doesn't and i wanted to sit these so low to the bottom of the cabinet so as not to waste space that i couldn't put one on the bottom either so this was really the best solution i could come up with that wasn't going to be too ugly i actually kind of like the leather and walnut together so after pre-drilling it on the back of the drawer i drilled it to the back of the cabinet and then all i had to do was slide the drawer in place and reach back there with my drill and screw the leather into the back of the drawer this is a little awkward because i'm blind when i'm screwing this in but it's not that bad and how often am i really going to be taking these drawers in and out probably not that often if ever and as you can see it works great so after doing it to one side i did the same thing again to the other side because i don't know if i mentioned this it's kind of a mirror image we got the same thing going on on the other side and finally the last piece i needed to make was the drawer face that would sit well on the face of the drawer where else did you think it was gonna go i mean it is called a drawer face so after cutting those pieces down to size i was ready to finish these things so i put my dividers in place and sanded everything so it's nice and smooth and even i took a piece of sandpaper and by hand i broke down all those internal edges and i was ready to start wiping it down with a crazy amount of rubio monocoat for this i'm just using pure because that beautiful black walnut doesn't need anything else i mean there is that white oak in the bottom i would have loved to stick some cotton white on that but yeah that was too much work as you can see with a little oil those dowels really start to come to life sure they're not hand cut dovetails but it is a great option if you need to put hardwood drawers together and you don't want to spend hours and hours doing it just drill some holes make some dowels and boom you got yourself some drawers after finishing the drawers themselves i also finished the internal parts of the coffee table that i left unfinished so that we could glue those wood drawer slides on and then the next morning after the finish was all dry i came out with a chunk of carnauba wax and i waxed up the drawer really good this is just going to help it slide on those wood runners just a little bit better you can really use any kind of wax you just want to stay away from any wax that's super gummy so that it doesn't attract dust after waxing the drawers i also took the time to wax the slides themselves and with that i was ready to reassemble everything and hopefully have a nicely working drawer and a finished coffee table i mean look ooh ah okay that's enough thank you with my drawers back in place i reattached my leather stopping device thing that i made yep still works that's good and finally it was time to attach the drawer faces to the drawer boxes themselves for this i just used some eighth inch spacer blocks to bring it up off the bottom and match that shadow line i made on the end of the coffee table and then i just eyeballed it for the sides it looked pretty even to me so i grabbed a few clamps with some paper towels so that i didn't mess up my freshly finished drawer face pulled the whole thing out pre-drilled a few holes and sank in some screws and zip zap soup my drawer was completely installed all right man that's enough pulling it in and out we've literally watched you do that like a hundred times in this video and it's getting pretty annoying with one side done i went over and did the same thing to the other side because if you haven't noticed it's kind of a mirror image over on that side same thing going on over there and then finally the most important step was to fill these beautiful drawers with the beautiful nectar of the gods dark brown liquor and some like beigey liquor and even one bottle of clear liquor you know for my grandma when she visits and with that we could close the drawer on this build or you could say we could turn the lights off on this project i made a joke well there you have it solid wood drawers that are very simple quick easy to make and they look great so if you don't want to spend your time trying to figure out how to do you know tedious dovetails or something like that this is a great option i hope you enjoyed it i hope you check out that video description for all the products links a link to my website you can get plans on there for various things and a link to my patreon account if you would like to support the channel further patreon is a great way to do it and i would so appreciate your patronage over there and it's just a really good fun time we have a crazy amount of fun over there and you get to see a lot of behind the scenes footage that you don't get to see in the videos so yeah mike wanna check it out until next time no pain

Channel: Bourbon Moth Woodworking

Views: 779,278

Keywords: how to make drawers, Build cabinets the easy way, How to Make Drawers, kitchen cabinets, how to, how to build drawers, diy drawers, how to make cabinets, plywood drawers, cabinet drawers, how to make drawers for cabinets, how to build kitchen cabinets, cabinet making, woodworking projects, cabinet maker, diy cabinets, how to build a drawer, how to make a drawer, building drawers, build drawers, building cabinets, diy drawer, drawer slides, building plywood cabinets, woods

Id: d5h0blpvND0

Length: 33min 8sec (1988 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 22 2022