How to easily attach drawer fronts to your cabinet

today we're going to put our wooden drawer fronts on to these plywood drawers using playing cards to align everything up let me show you how I do it when building cabinets you want to use the drawer material that's going to be a stable wood you don't necessarily want to make it out of just regular hardwood or softwood you generally want to use something like a plywood that remains stable now this particular drawer is built on a Baltic birch I find that wood to be very good for drawers because I can use the half-inch size make rather deep drawers and yet the drawer is nice and solid and I want to worry about the load that's going to be put into it now when you put these drawers inside a cabinet you're subject to the size of your drawer slides and how that all fits in and sometimes you just can't get it to get in there perfectly so if this front part here was made to size where has when this drawer goes in it would hit the sides making taking the adjustments by moving around the drawer slides is rather difficult so one of the ways that we get around that is we actually make solid wood drawer fronts for our drawers and that way we can attach them afterwards and align them all up so we can make these the size to fit this opening perfectly and we can make adjustments on it to make it fit in here perfectly so I'm going to show you my method of how I attached drawer fronts to my drawers and align them in the cabin okay so when you're building drawers you're gonna have handles on them and the place where the handles are important now I like to drill out my handles before I attach my drawer fronts to my drawers and I'll show you why in a little while I do that but on my top drawers they're all going to be the same with her - should say and so I'm gonna put these handles in the center of my design here now on my other doors I'm sorry other drawers I should say now on my other drawers I'm gonna have them various width so they're gonna be different with widths depending on we want to put in them throughout the kitchen so I have to have a uniform look now the handle is gonna be at different spots I don't want them all in the center and necessarily on some large drawers I'd rather pull from the top a little bit so what I'm going to do is I'm a place all of my handles down one third into this square into this visible square in the center here that I made so in this particular case I measure from here to here and I divide that measurement by three and so what I came up with is that this is on this particular drawer it's going to be two inches down from the top here from a bottom of this line here this Purpleheart down so the easiest way I found to do that is I actually use a combination square and I will adjust the combination square until my two inch mark is right at the bottom of that Purpleheart line in the drawer and the drawer and then I just tighten up this piece and so now I have a nice solid guide to get down to my two inches so rather than make marks on my drawer I use this Craig drawer drilling guide it has a fence here I should say and it has a marking line here for the center of your drawer pool so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to put it up next to this combination square and make adjustments on this so that that mark is right at the end of my combination square which is two inches below that Purpleheart the top line in the Purple Heart and then I'm going to slide this so that I can lock them in lock that fence in and that way it's exactly two inches now this particular case that was a little bit longer so let me adjust this a little bit short I should say won't come down just a tiny bit there we go just like that so now my drawer pulls when I align them up are going to be exactly two inches down from the bottom of that Purpleheart line and again I just don't wanna make any marks on the drawer so the other thing I want to do is I want to find the center of my drawer so these particular drawers are thirteen and a half across and even though I can do it because thirteen and a half so twelve would be six five and then one half of a quarter so B five and three quarters but just to make sure they don't mess up I use a app on here that's a fraction calculator and I'm gonna take a 13-point 13 and 1/2 and I'm gonna divide that by two and I guess a good thing I checked it's 6 and 3/4 setting I had the one in my head so 6 and 3/4 so to make sure I'm going to measure 6 and 3/4 here mark that and 6 and 3/4 come across here and yeah that's my center so now that I know what my center is I'm going to use some blue tape and I'm gonna mark it at my center point here and so 6 and 3/4 so I'm gonna put the tape down at 6 and 3/4 and sometimes you know it's kind of a hassle because you don't have enough hands at times you know sometimes you wish you were the God with all the arms so that you could do everything at once but right now I know at this side of the tape and I'm gonna mark this side of the tape here is my 6 and 3/4 mark and I'm gonna make sure that's the same on both sides and I'm actually in a little bit of an angle here so I'm gonna pull this tape up and again the nice thing about the blue tape is it doesn't leave marks they leave residue and I'm going to measure again and make my placement down so now six and three-quarters to the right side of the tape six and three-quarters to the right set of tapes that's my center market with an X and now I can take my jig and place the center line the jig also has a center line on it too and I've already separated these two holes here I've already placed them at the proper distance for my handles so as you can see I put one handle up in here already so I'm gonna get the other one out and go ahead double check to make sure that all these handles are the same and they are so now I'm gonna take my drill and make sure that this is pushed over and I make my to drill holes here for my handles and a trick here is not to go all the way through both pieces of plywood so now I have two perfect holes drilled here and the double check just to make sure perfect all right so now I have two holes here with these two holes lined up here now I can go ahead and begin to get this lined up onto my drawer now so this particular one is gonna go in the center here and you can see how it fits there and I probably shouldn't do that because I don't want to drop it now one method that's used a lot is the double-sided tape where your stick double-sided tape up here and that double-sided tape holds the piece on and then you pull it out and you screw it from the back you can clap together and screw from the back and that works really good but in this particular case as you can see these drawers are rather difficult to pull out because they have that soft clothes so in order to make this work with the tape I'm going to have to remove this top drawer so that I can easily get into my drawer from up here so I can push my drawer out when I need to and work it that way so the way that this all works is that you put this in here and you see how much room you have on both sides and this is still it's kind of a tight fit right there I'm gonna have to adjust that a tiny bit but once I lift it up it's pretty good so I'm gonna take a couple playing cards and place them at the bottom here to give it some space now I have a nice even setup all the way around so I have one card here one card here and I have two cards up here let me see if I can get away from one card so I know that I have three cards in that position there so I'm gonna pull them out dror out to get this down I'm gonna cut a couple of pieces of double-sided tape here and I'll have links for the double-sided tape down below and you know don't forget to subscribe to the channel so that you can keep up to date on my entire kitchen remodel and plus a lot of other woodworking in between and now if you remember I add a card down here I had a card here and I had a card up there so alright so that's pretty level there now I'm just gonna push this drawer as hard as I can onto that double sided tape and make a nice firm connection there when I pull the cards out this didn't move at all so I know the tape is sticking and now I can bring the drawer out take a couple clamps and then clamp them up as to where it was that so now I can come in from this side and drill and lock this in place and make sure that everything fits if not I can make some adjustments after the fact so I'm going to start that [Music] okay so I've screwed on my front with four screws in the back here so this is on here pretty solid I left the tape in there it's not gonna hurt anything and I used these drill holes here too as a pattern to drill out in the back here for my drawer so now what I need is I need to add on to my hat on my handles here and the screws that came with the handles they're just not long enough for me if you stick it through it doesn't even go through the half inch and three-quarter inch so it's much too short I need about an inch and a half and unfortunately I have our two inch ones now unfortunately well before it so that's what I have now just let you know these are the same bolts that you can buy at the hardware store you can get him in like I think 5050 pieces here it was maybe five bucks but they're used for wall sockets for light fixtures and electrical outlets to screw them into the boxes so they're the same size they're eight 30 seconds they fit pretty much standard most of your hardware for cabinets will be eight thirty seconds so these are a little bit too long so what I do is I stick this through and I make a mark on there has to where I think this should be cut and as I'm affecting this one here is one that I'm I do and so I make the mark across there with my sharpie and electricians also have make sure that the same like you these pliers that are used for crimping down the plastic connectors for wires but they also have this little eight second eight thirty second screw in here so for those of you don't know what that is you basically screw this bolt in if it's too long and it takes a little bit of time here I'll try to go as fast I can't ignore speed this up but I screw it in until my mark is on the side of my pliers here so now I can just squeeze this down and that's gonna cut this piece off and you see that it cut off the end here and because it's threaded here when I backed this out its gonna read thread that part that it cuts so you know how sometimes when you cut a a bolt you have that thread that's all messed up well this particular one not an issue there so now I have both my bolts I've already cut one before that can stick through here and this should be enough for me to attach my handle all right so I'm gonna put my bolts through here and start threading and I move the camera to the other side cuz I am right handed so that way I'm not getting in your way and there you have it the handle and the drawer are all set to go everything's looks good okay so that's how I like to touch my drawer fronts to the drawers I've been doing that for a long time when I had my cabinet shop that's the same way we attach the drawer fronts there that works both in inset drawer fronts and overlaid drawer fronts works exactly the same so if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe maybe hit that little bell so you get notifications on new videos that we'll have coming out I will cover my entire kitchen remodel I will also have a lot of in-between items that I'm going to be working on especially I'm gonna start on some Christmas projects here real soon so please I hope to have you tagging along when I'm doing all that if you have any questions leave them in the comments below I always do my best to answer in a timely manner other than that I hope you enjoyed the video and hope to see you in the next one

Channel: Mad Nerd Workshop

Views: 7,382

Rating: 4.875 out of 5

Keywords: Home repair, Table, Bits, Storage, Rockler, Bench, woodworking, shop, workshop, cabinets, stripped screw, handyman, Sandpaper, Rack, disk sandpaper, Ridgid, Jointer, Table Saw, Tip, carpentry, Glue up, Glue Joint, Assembly, Shop, Porter-Cable, Cabinet Making, Kitchen Remodel, Router Bits, Router table, shop organization, Bessey, Parallel Clamps, Bandy Clamps, Irwin, Bar, Kreg Tools, Master, Craftman, Furniture, Scraper, Card, wood, edge, Drawers, drawer fronts, installation, maple, puple heart

Id: -Ty9G23mT1c

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 02 2019