Master Class for Professional Grade Cabinet Drawers

hi thanks for stopping by next level carpentry in the shop today working on this master closet cabinet project and today is the day for building drawers the 24-inch cabinet and the 36 get four drawers on the bottom and I'm going to go through the process the last few cabinet jobs I've done the drawers have been made out of melamine which is kind of a different process but with these being stained wood cabinets I wanted to make the drawers out of wood instead of melamine melamine is nice in the kitchen stuff like that because the surface is durable you can always wash it but a cabinet in a closet shouldn't need that kind of cleaning or durability and looks is a little more important so making these out of half-inch Russian birch and I just want to walk you through the unique process I use for making these drawers typical to when I start a new project I go on YouTube and look around to see what's out there and I haven't seen the method or the style that I use here there's features of it in different videos but this is a project I'm selling to a customer they pay me good money to make these cabinets and the drawers can't be marginal so I'll just go through the process I use for making the actual drawers I'm not going to cover how I figured out the drawer size that's determined on the hardware I'm using this Hettich soft-close drug light hardware and each specific hardware determines the actual outside dimensions of the drawer and then the the height of the space and the number of drawers determines the actual height of the drawers that's a whole separate process so I'm not going to get into that I've just got the finished depth on these which is going to be 14 and 3/4 inches and then the width is like 23 and a half and 33 in a corridor whatever the those end up being but I'll go through the process of making what I call professional drawers for finished cabinetry skews the head its soft close Hardware I'm using this little Clippy thing is what holds the front of the drawer down the back of the drawer hooks into this little hook in the back and these pull out real nice and easy and once the spring mechanism with the plunger is engaged it pulls the drawer in real smooth and real slow because of the nature of the glide the drawer has to fit over this rail the bottom of the drawer covers it so I'm raising up the bottom panel in the drawer a half inch to cover this rail when it's extended and that allows me to put a dado for the door bottom whereas on a melamine drawer I just screw the bottom of the drawer to the bottom of the side pieces I use a very hands-on method for calculating the drawer size I hope you'll be able to see this but I just take a piece of scrap and I draw out full scale the height of the cabinet and divide it up like I want for the depths of drawers to suit the customers needs for what they're putting in these cabinets and then I do using that hardware I figure out how much space I need on the inside of the cabinet so that the drawer goes in smoothly it doesn't bind or get stretched but I do this you know very hands-on it's full scale I just draw all this stuff out and then measure what I got left so that's how I come up with the size of the drawers I've got this list here the heights are three and a half five and a half seven and a half and nine and a quarter and then the front and back pieces our 33 and a quarter for the wide cabinet and 22 and 3/4 for the narrow one so that way I have the quantity and the sizes that I need and I can lay it out for the most efficient use on this five foot square half inch Russian birch plywood and for a part layout it only makes sense to start with the longest and widest parts first even though Russian birch in a five foot square size is different than the four by eight materials I'm used to working with it can really work out nice for parts like this just a matter of shuffling around to get the maximum yield and I didn't script any of this but there's a lot of thoughts that go through my head when I'm doing this and one of the things is basically by cutting out the cabinet parts I'm determining how big the scraps are going to be that are left over and get thrown out in the end in this case no matter how efficiently I cut these parts out I'm not going to get everything out of one sheet so that means I need two sheets great call Einstein so I have to buy two sheets to get the job done and I'm not going to use two sheets to finish this up so I can be a little more extravagant on the way I cut out the parts on this piece if I cut the Front's for the wide and narrow cabinet out of this there's about a four inch strip left over that's not going to do me any good anywhere so I can just cut right down the middle of that scrap that way I trim off all the irregular factory edges and I can move things around a little bit if there's some part of the grain that I don't want to use this goes for this Russian birch that goes for pretty much anything and then when I get into the second sheet that's going to work out fine for all the sides and there'll be a fair amount left over so I don't have to dial in and you know just take the dirt off the edge and nothing more I can clean it up nice sheet goods tend to be slightly thicker at the edges plywood can be a little irregular throughout but generally a 1/2 to 3/4 inch in from the edge it's pretty consistent so I anytime that I've got this excess of material it's basically just going to end up as scrap I choose to trim it off in a manner to get the most consistent results in all the parts that I'm cutting out the other thing about this process it goes for any making anything with cabinets but particularly with drawers is I need to make sure that I'm cutting each dimension throughout the whole project so every side that ends up at nine and a quarter inches tall I've got to run all the nine and a quarters with one saw setting even if I move the fence back to nine and a quarter I've got to really be careful to get these parts a consistent size and it really shows up if you're off a 64th of an inch or 1/32 of an inch so this the quickest way the most efficient way is to cut the sizes to cut all these parts in a sequence that I can run the final dimension all in one pass it's a little less critical for the height of these drawers than the width and the depth because of the joiner I'm using on the corners so I've I'll cut this stuff out I'll cut all the pieces to length first and then I'll cut them all to length after that maybe that will make sense as the video goes on but I wanted to put those comments in here because I'm not just deciding oh I need two parts that are nine and a quarter by thirty three and a quarter and cutting those two parts out and then doing something else I do everything systematically the best I can so that the final pass on all the parts is made with the exact same saw set up that way if something's the slightest bit strong or slightest bit weak and I'm talking you know 64th of an inch it's all the same it all fits in the cabinet fine and get a great end result hope that makes sense so I've already determined that I can get these nine and a quarter seven and a half I only have three and a half inch pieces by stacking them this way on the sheet I want all the grain to run horizontally on the drawers I've seen a few drawers built with the grain running vertically on the drawers structurally the plywood is fine but just ask Abby in my opinion so I'm gonna make sure all the grain runs horizontally on these drawers but I can comfortably get thirty three and a quarter and twenty two and three quarters out of this sheet so I'm just going to start off with thirty three and a quarter I'm going to go 34 inches and take a soccer fright there and then that'll leave me plenty for the 22 and 3/4 with that scrap and once I've got the thirty three and a quarter inch and twenty-two or three-quarter inch cut offs here I'll go to the other sheet and I'll cut enough for all these pieces for all the sides that are going to be 14 and 3/4 I'll just make us three fourteen and three-quarter inch cuts off the end of a sheet and I'll add another big-picture word of caution here in that this Russian birch plywood isn't always square on the corners you can see here that's that's a strong sixteenth in twenty-two and a half inches that's not going to be anywhere near acceptable for this draw project so at some stage as I'm cutting the parts I need to correct for that error I'm still able to cut my pieces using this end to index from but at some point I'll need to square up this parallel edge to correct for this error it's no big deal as long as you're aware of it checking the four corners of this first sheet I noticed that this one is very nice so I'll mark it as square and then use this edge in this corner to index from and that'll minimize the amount of correction I need to do later anybody that works in a small shop understands the gymnastics necessary for cutting large sheets in a small space and tend to develop a workflow that's manageable and whatever their space is with whatever the tools they have I've gotten plenty of questions on these out few roller stands and at some point I fully intend to do a build video for these guys because they work great for this sort of operation especially for a one-man show like mine 34 and a quarter right that way I've got an inch to trim I've got a Freud thin kerf crosscut blade in the saw it's a great Buy and a great value works excellent on this plywood with a rather delicate veneer another thing when cutting large sheets anytime I can I put the widest part of a sheet on the table rather than let it dangle off the end that's just logical but it's worth a mention and that goes for even if I just need the narrow piece if I need a 12-inch piece off this I'll cut it at 48 and then trim the actual piece hope that makes sense and I keep thinking of more things on the factory edge that's going to run along the fence I'll take one of my best blocks for demanding sanding this one is sixty grit and I'll wipe that edge to make sure there's no rocks embedded in there and it takes out any little bumps and remove splinters that might skew the sheet as it goes past the RIP fence a quick wipe is all it takes [Music] [Music] if there's any issues on that initial cut I can move the fence over take another 3/16 off for a clean edge because I left enough scrap on the factory edge to trim it up but that was a perfect cut I'm happy with it and just flip the sheet so the cut edge goes up against the fence blue Smurf gloves help manage these sheets especially when working alone and now that I've got one edge cut perfectly I'll trim the other side and I know that I get all my narrow drawer fronts out of one sheet and all my Y drawer fronts the other sheet so they'll be identical in length precisely again the narrow pieces are 22 and 3/4 [Music] the combination of a sharp blade zero-clearance throat insert and a sensible feed rate mean very very minimal roughness on the cut on the bottom side of the sheet the edges wonderfully smooth and accurate the process for all the side pieces is the same with that second sheet apply would kind of has an a side and a B side I want the a side on the inside of the drawers so I flip that over that appears to be the unsquare corner ooh boy this is almost an eighth of an inch so it may be that edge that's off and not the end [Music] that would appear to be the case that the edges aren't parallel it's tipped like this I think but nevertheless here's a square corner saw index from it I've got plenty to work with for these fourteen and three-quarter inch pieces so I'll set out leaving about an inch waist on that side 15 and 3/4 to a soft curve here on some projects the difference between using two sheets and three as a matter of soft kerf placement so I've got to really dial these things in and it's pretty extravagant to leave that much trimming on the edge but in this case I've got plenty so I don't have to stress about it I've got the 1 inch and 14 and 3/4 laid out there I'll put another 14 and 3/4 on here generously just call it 15 inches and that leaves a total piece if I rip this to all 31 I'll have a straight edge here and then I can make those two 14 and 3/4 inch cuts accurately I'm just kind of letting the camera roll because this is what work in my shop looks like no more blade height down my favorite shop stool back here works great as a holding point for that clean up the edge and I might clean up a dozen edges before I ever find one Rock or flaw in that edge but it's worth it and let's see 31 inches is my number gives me plenty of margin for trimming roller stands about set I'm pointing to the RIP fence where I have to make sure workpiece doesn't rock on the fence it has to be indexed and sliding smoothly exactly along the fence for accurate cuts I'm confident on my cuts and the quality of this first cut on this sheet so I'll just set the fence to 14 3/4 and cut all my side pieces at the same time if there was any problems with this first cut I can cut this first 114 in quarter to get a nice true edge and flip those again all is working off the best cut I can to yield parts that are as accurate as possible [Music] I'm not sure if it's obvious or not but I'm always pushing down and in as the piece goes through the saw I rock it here to make sure I'm happy with the way that's lined up I've got enough RIP fence back behind the blade if I slide the fence that way if I slide the fence that way and start feeding the piece crooked it's going to ruin it when I'm pushing the wide piece through I'm very careful with the offcut to make sure I'm not pushing too hard on it so it binds on the blade I don't have a riving knife and I can get kickback that way so pressures down and in on the work piece and then the other one just follows along I'm not in a race here I want to work fast and efficiently but I don't have to push this through and see how fast to stop this all cut it's much more important to get smooth accurate cut so that the parts identical when they're done that's sweet so with that sequence of steps I've got all my drawer parts cut to length the Front's the backs and the sides next thing is to rip them to width and I need to make sure that I'm squaring things up as I go along these edges are perfectly parallel regardless of what the edges of the sheets are doing but this is one I have to pay attention to that before I start ripping these pieces off and the size of the sheet and a number of Parts I get out of these is a little bit forgiving so I don't have to get my rips down so tight to the saw kerf at the risk of needing a whole nother sheet of material I always like it when I've got a little bit of a cushion there which I do so to do this again I want to break the bigger sheet down to a more manageable size and so I'll lay out the two widest drawers the nine and a half or whatever nine and a half's and the seven and a half I'll make a rip square everything up and then go to cut the narrower pieces you'll see the process and hopefully it makes more sense all right I know I need to make to nine and a quarter rips off the bottom of each piece and then to seven and a half inch rips so I'm going to go one inch for trimming mine and a quarter and a saw kerf nine and a quarter and a saw kerf seven and a half and a soccer seven and a half and a soccer and that's not precisely accurate because I've got a cushion down here in that one inch extra and so I'm just going to go thirty five and a half inches for the initial cut and then just verify that I could get the two five and a half's which is that five and a half five and a half and then I've got three and a half twice three and a half three and a half and you can see I've got almost six inches to spare even with pretty liberal layouts of these pieces so I can start with the fence set to thirty five and a half inches and break these pieces down a little bit this corner is still nice and square as is this one and this one not that one all right this is the squarest one on the sheet but it's still questionable but this is good enough for this initial sizing it's important to clean up the edges just like it was cleaning up the ends 35 and a half it's the initial cut [Music] and I left this last cut in there that's very marginal the piece between the blade and the fence is wider than it is long the danger of this getting crossways in the blade or having something pinch or go bad it's pretty high I left it in there that's the way I do it sometimes but I'm not advising that technically something that you don't know that I do is take a block of paraffin and rub it on the fence and that keeps the piece from binding along that aluminum fence and increases my comfort zone but it doesn't increase it enough to do the narrow pieces so I deploy my Osborne eb-3 miter fence and a special block I use to carry the fence past the edge of the table for these wider pieces Smurf clubs are a real good idea for this kind of operation and help yield excellent results [Music] [Music] and there's on my initial cuts and a lot of YouTube channels have a giant outfeed table overhead dust collection riving knife saw stop all sorts of stuff that's wonderful for anybody that has it and uses it and requires it I'd use it if I had it I don't but this is how the process works I'm constantly paying attention though to the danger areas binding on the blade kickback and that sort of thing so if this looks smooth and easy there's a thought process going behind it and there's occasions I have accidents you know I mean it's it's working in the shop things happen it's it's rare and but woodworking can be dangerous so pay attention keep yourself safe all right with those initial cuts made I want to determine that this edge is Square to the ends of all these pieces on all these cuts so I'll go through that process and once I've determined inaccuracies I'll show you how I deal with them all right I checked through all the pieces the first stack was pretty good I didn't have to do anything with those two pieces of the second stack weren't so good and I hope you can see this video I know that the two edges are parallel because we ripped them at the same time so if there's anything in question it's the edge that's off not the end and I don't know if you can see that it's about 1/32 of an inch out a square on this corner this is opened so I basically need to trim 1/32 to nothing off this end to make this corner square and this is where accurate machine setup is really handy I'm going to dial my jointer in to a skinny 32nd of an inch about there and here's the trick to squaring a sheet in a flash so I've got to take 1/32 of an inch more off this it inside of the sheath in this side I've got the infeed table set 1/32 of an inch lower than the outfeed table so I just Park the end that doesn't need anything taken off on the outfeed table if you can see that there's 1/32 of an inch in between the table and the piece zoom in so you can see that little bit of space now when I plane this it'll take nothing to 1/32 off across that edge I have to do the process in this sequence to be safe and you can see by one pass over the jointer that I've squared up the edge of this sheet to the sides to perfection leaving me a square corner now as I make successive cuts as long as I use this edge to index from everything will come out parallel and square in the end this other wider sheet has a squareness deficiency as well my battery is quickly dying one battery down one to go I'm not sure where that died out but you can see on this sheet there's a strong thirty-second of out a squareness already by the time it gets the other end of the sheet it's going to be a sixteenth of an inch so I'll correct for that on the jointer the process is quick and easy so if your first guess isn't right if you over guess just flip the sheet and firend and make a correction you can and you can dial it in going one way or the other until you're happy with how square it is and I got lucky on this first pass and I'm completely satisfied with that edge for squareness and I guess I've gotten a reputation for digging in the weeds and going into detail and not worrying about video length so I'll pile on a little bit here and say that I've got carbide knives it's a helical head in this jointer and if you have high speed steel knives in a jointer and use you plane Russian birch on its edge and my old jointer or this one before I had the carbide knives there's something an abrasive quality about that glue it can actually put little ribs in your jointer knives it doesn't do it with carbide but if you're if you're doing this on a jointer with high speed steel knives you might want to crowd one edge or the other so you don't put little grooves right in the middle of the blade and I'm not sure if that's for everybody's blades but a word of caution I think that's about that I'm going to rough these out to make two of each woods pieces on those it'll be the nine and a quarter and eight and a half and this will be the five and a half and three and a half but I'll just cheat them a little bit wide make a rough rip off this off the square edge and then I'll take the final setting to the final dimension off everything and for that I'm going to fire up the gyro air g700 dust processor because there's a lot of cutting going on at the same time and I'll just let the video run when I'm going through the process that is the world's quietest dust collector but the sound of eleven hundred CFM rushing air in the shop makes the audio a little bit hard to deal with so I'm just going to work and not worry about the audio this is pretty simple I just lay out nine and a quarter twice with a saw kerf and then just jump up so I'll go 19 inches for this initial cut and that'll leave plenty for the two seven and a half inch pieces that need to come out of here and when I'm cutting a large batch of parts like this I'm always mindful of the edges this is a cut edge this is a factory edge when I cut this this will be a truer edge than the previous cut one so I'll turn the pieces around so they index against the fence for the final cut and I'll make sure I don't flip these pieces so that I end up indexing off a rough factory edge but a nice cut on this side and plenty of times I mark these things for a good cut or whatever so I can keep it all organized because if you get one of these pieces flipped around and you go through the same sequence you're going to have one part that doesn't line up with anything else and that's a pain to deal with [Music] [Music] well let's say all this audio comes out I got the g700 running over there and when I talk about these parts everything here has a perfect edge on this side all these corners are square and each one of these pieces is the width of two drawer sites so the white ones here are two up to nine in the quarters then there's two seven and a half to five and a half to two three and a half so I just make this sauce setting once and cut all the parts and I'm starting with the nine and a quarters [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] well I could probably do this video as a standalone talking about making accurately sized parts but I guess that's not my reputation for short videos so now that all these parts are precisely sized hopefully I got my cheat sheet right the next thing is going to be to cut the joinery and slot for the drawer bottoms so the next thing I'll do is put a groove on the good face and the bad edge of each of these pieces to hold the drawer bottoms they're going to be made out of this oak linear material same thing I used on the back of the cabinets it's nominal quarter-inch oak veneer MDF and as such it's not quite a full quarter of an inch thick I really like these starett fractional dial calipers for this sort of work because they show me that this material is a 64th of an inch less than 1/4 normally I would use a dado blade to plow those dedos but because it's under a quarter inch my dado blade doesn't go that thin the two outside blades add up to thicker than that plus they have a special grind on them that doesn't leave a flat bottom when they're used by themselves so I'll switch to a full kerf eighth inch rip blade in the table saw and plow the dedos in two passes using that blade and I choose to do all this joinery on a table saw instead of with a router it can be done with a router but the table saw is a lot quicker and more accurate and I think the cuts are cleaner router bits on this volume of work they even a carbide bit starts to get dull it smokes a lot leaves a lot of burrs on the cuts but using a table saw with a sharp blade is quick clean easy and very accurate as a rule I use this four inch forest blade stabilizer keeps wobble out of the blade especially if my feeding my feed rates a little fast or unsteady this is a Freud full eighth inch curved flat bottom grind 1/8 inch rip blade that doubles as a great data blade for narrow day tools like these I get to talking and forget my washer and I'll switch out the insert for this wider blade I made extra draw parts for setup operations like this and I want the dado to be a quarter inch deep and you can get all kind of fancy gauges for setting blade depth personally this is tough to beat just make sure I'm hitting my pencil mark at top dead center lock the blade in and set the fence to 5/8 of an inch which is the distance from the bottom of the drawer side to the bottom of the bottom panel I'm setting the blade just ever so shallow of the quarter inch and I'll dial it in [Music] just a touch shell I'll go with that and now I run all the parts with this first pass I'll mark this setup piece with the capital P for pattern and set it aside this whole procedure is beyond monotonous so I'll just tell you that I I select each piece find the best face and the worst edge put that up to the fence and run that pass through it go through the whole stack until they're all done I'm using a panel from the jointer for pushing the pieces through because it's faster than a push stick [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] that data when process is something I probably should have had chip work on but you can see all the parts now have a dado plowed in the bottom edge of the code face for the inside of the drawer at this point the Front's of fronts and backs and the sides of the drawers diverge in the process and get different parts of joinery so I'll separate these out this is all the side pieces these are all the fronts and backs obviously [Music] and they go their separate ways in the joinery process and the first thing I'll do is put the first part of the corner lock joint on the inside of the faces of all these pieces and because of the sequence that I use for cutting these parts once I switch them over to this orientation all these pieces are precisely the same length and the width just stair-step it's the same with all the fronts and the backs and that's what modular parts for drawers should look like at this stage of the game making the corner joint that I use on these drawers is a two-step process the first one starts out by making an eighth inch basically an eighth inch crosscut dado that's set back from the end of the drawer side the thickness of the drawer side and the second step is putting a tongue on the end of all the front and back pieces this way the side pieces run the full length and the fronts and backs run into them so on the finished drawer you're not looking at end grain the drawer front covers this and the sides cover the front and back for a nice clean looking drawer to make this eighth inch crosscut dado here I'm going to use that same full eighth inch kerf ripping blade in a perfect world I would switch that out to a flat bottom full kerf crosscut blade but I don't have that blade so I'll just use a little slower feed rate with this rip blade and it'll come out fine especially with the zero clearance insert in there using my sample piece pattern the first thing I do is to change the depth setting on the blade from a quarter inch to an H of an inch I'm just going to mark it out on the side here because it's easier to see that should do that now I want to set the far side of the blade to match up to the thickness of this material so that those two are just flush right there and I'm going to run that on a scrap scrap first just to double-check my setting [Music] and I like the way that looks for width and and according to this starett it's one hundred and twenty eighth of an inch over an eighth of an inch deep and I'm going to go with that and I'll take this opportunity to mention that I'll put links to these tools like this stare at fractional dial caliper in the video description the links go to an amazon influencers page for next level carpentry where you get the same low online price for anything you buy there but because you used a link from this channel amazon pays a small ad fee that helps support video production here once I've locked down the settings I'll run the cross cut dado on my pattern and if I'm still happy I'll go through all the parts with this procedure [Music] [Music] so all my pieces will look like this when I get done with this step again I'm using a slow feed rate because this is a ripp blade and not a crosscut blade and I still want to end up with a nice smooth cut I've got to remember to do only the inside faces of the side pieces and not start cutting the fronts and backs that would be upsetting and there's not a lot of volume of dust here so I'm just going to let it fill up the cabinet and I'll suck it up later with a dust collector I don't need the miter gauge for these wider pieces because I can feed them through steadily but on all the pieces I want to make absolutely sure there's no splinters or crumbs on the ends to throw off the position of the cut with all the dado is put on the sides the next step is to put a small tenon on each end of all the front and back pieces that fits into this small data or mortise on the sides because I used an eighth inch blade to make this groove that tenon needs to be 1/8 inch thick and 1/8 inch long so it fits snugly down into that groove so I set the height of the blade to this shoulder of the dado here I can't see it the way it's set up now and then I put an auxilary fence on here and brought it over till the teeth are just rubbing on it and that'll cut away the waste under here and leave that small tenon I've dialed this thing in for a snug fit so I'll run one here shows how and show how it fits and this tenon ultimately goes on the inside face of the drawer so I'm putting the undated side down and making the cut but this is just a sample piece [Music] [Music] and as the saw winds down you can hear the teeth rubbing on the face of that auxilary fence which assures me that this tenon is 1/8 of an inch long like I said I already dialed this in for a snug fit that's how I want it it holds itself in there with no glue or anything and if you look here I hope you can see this that this tenon bottoms out in that little dado the shoulder fits tight there's ever so slightly extra wood sticking out here that'll make the drawer fit nice to the back of the finished front that goes on there and this can be flush or in but I just don't want the front or back to be sticking out past the end of the drawer when it's all done this is a shade more than I love that's more than acceptable this is the kind of fit that I'm after I have to sand these pieces but then they get a coat of finish on them so the sanding will make this fit loose and then the finish will Snug it back up again with those thicknesses if I make this too tight it'll break off this lug here and make the drawer weak if I make it too loose it's just a sloppy fit that's the sweet spot in the middle I'll flip all these parts over ahead of time so that I don't have to think about it when I'm going through the steps I get both ends with this facedown do it on all the Front's and all the backs on a project like this this is the easiest place to mess something up so I try to do everything I can to keep things organized because it's not unheard of to accidentally put the dado down and put the tang on the wrong side of every single piece and have it to start over it doesn't happen often but that kind of thing can happen so i do everything i can to prevent it keep things flowing smoothly and procedure is about as exciting as watching paint dry so you can see here how it starts so I'll just jump ahead until I've got a little tenon on all the ends of all the fronts and backs keep in mind that I'm using a slow feed rate because of the coarseness of this blade if I do a lot more of this I'd invest in a cross cut blade with a flat bottom grind that's an eighth inch thick but for this as you can see with the results it's more than good and that's the type of fit and precision I'm looking for at this stage of the game any various here this piece is just ever so slightly loose definitely not a problem or a deal-breaker generally that has to do with very very slight variations in the overall thickness of the plywood I can get a variation like that by putting more or less pressure against the fence etc those tolerances are extremely small that result in those kind of differences but I think the accuracy of this joinery is pretty tough to beat I hope you can see why I do it on a table saw there's not a lot of burrs or burn on here one wipe with a piece of 120 grit sandpaper is gonna more than clean that up and make for some very sweet looking doors and so that's why I gravitate towards doing this sort of drawer building work using a table saw instead of a router and a router table well I got that monotonous process done of getting the Tenon's on all the fronts and backs and this stack of drawer parts is shaping up pretty good at this point the front and the back of the drawers diverge where because I slipped the bottom panel in from the back and it gets screwed on to the bottom I rip off this dado and the bottom of the piece if I was pressed for material I would have ripped half of these pieces three quarters of an inch narrower from the get-go but because it was all about the scraps I just decided to wait until now so what I'll do on the pieces that I want to be the back of the drawer and if there's a good one and a bad one I always put the good one at the back of the drawer because that's what gets seen looking into it nobody ever sees the inside back of the front of the drawer so if there's a good one and a bad one I'll pick the good one and then rip the bottom the groove off for the back of the drawers that'll make more sense when you see me put these things together but for now that's the next step so these two piles are now two drawer fronts and these two piles are the drawbacks and there's an example of how easy it is to get mixed up I want all these pieces or any of it this way so I can rip off the same amount every time I don't have to change it for each width of drawer and I got to reset the fence to make that cut I'm setting the far side of the blade to this side of the notch and I'll use one of my favorite push sticks in the quarter inch thickness to push the scrap on out [Music] that's kind of a cool-looking piece of scrap isn't it [Music] next level coverage reviewers are probably used to hearing me say it takes a lot to be good it's just a little bit more to be the best and with that thought in mind there's one more thing I'll do to these drawer parts before screwing them together and putting a bottom in them and that is to make just a little decorative cutout in the top edges of the sides of the drawers and I'll use a router table setup to start the process and I'm going to chuck up this big Freud rabbeting bit into the plunge router I've got set up in the table mainly because I like the outside cut diameter of this bit and I'll push it up enough to it'll cut through the half-inch all right well I've got this router fence set up and you go ahead and laugh if you want I hardly ever use a router table with a router fence so I just have this shot made fixture here gets everything done that I needed to but it's not all blue and anodized and sharp looking so you can laugh at the fence and laugh at me but I don't think you'll laugh at the results the way this is set up is to put a 3/8 notch I'll call it along the top end of each piece and it starts two inches in from each end or starts and stops two inches in from the ends I've got the pattern piece that I'm going to run this on first before I do the top edge of all the sides the front and back stay the way they are zooming in you can see that I've got this bit it's raised up enough to cut all the way through this half inch material I've got this set so that it'll cut 3/8 deep along here I've got a block on this end to start the cut so that it doesn't kick back on me and then I just push it through until it stops at this block which will end the cut right where I want it on this end pretty simple process but it's a pretty big cut and there'll be some initial bog down as it initiates the cut but I've got this block back here to keep it from taking off and ruining the piece this is a job for Smurf gloves and ear plugs I don't have a dust collector set up for this so it's just gonna fly but that's alright it's a woodshop I'll do the pattern if I like it I'll run through a couple these pieces so you can see how this works [Music] and that's looking just like I want it the shoulder starts two inches in from each end of the piece there's nothing magic about two inches I just like it for proportion you think that cargo that bits kind of got a sick bearing can give out I mean one of these times like I said you can laugh or snicker at my setup and this router fence if you like but I think the results speak for themselves I've got a perfectly accurate notch on one edge of all the side pieces there's one more step for milling these sides before I go to screw them together so the finishing touch for these drawer sides is to put a thumbnail profile on the swoop section of the drawer just from there to there not all the way around or anything else some viewers watch me put thumbnail edging on the shelves in the shop that was inch and a half thick edging or inch and a quarter this is just a half inch thick I'm using a quarters round over bit and it's not set to the full depth I just take a pass from each face [Applause] it gives me a nice thumbnail profile but it's not a full round over it's just kind of a subtle detail that I really like I dialed that bit in for this depth and if the bits not set deep enough there's a flat spot in between the two curves if the bit is set too deep it leaves a shoulder on there I've got one of those here somewhere this one's got the shoulder but I'll know if you can see it I just play around with it till I get it in that sweet spot and then hit all the edges pardon that audio it's double miked once I've got the setting where I like it I lock everything down and then just freehand this thumbnail on all the pieces and that's all it takes to add that nice little detail on the drawer and once this is all sanded and varnished that really stands out as a finishing touch this whole detail could be done on a router table as well but I just like the D handle router and the freehand feel of doing these little thumbnails and this is what a set of eight drawers looks like before assembly I'm going to screw these boxes together to get a measurement for the bottoms cut the bottoms put and put them in and screw everything together and test fit the hardware before I take everything apart sand it and give it a lacquer finish rolling these drawer boxes together the joinery gives it quite a bit of strength I could just clamp and glue these and that'd be very strong but I'll back it up with some screws and I'm using a six by inch and a quarter a small square drive sheet metal screw works real nice for this stuff mainly because of the pilot hole and countersink I get with this snappy bit and everybody knows I love snappy bits this is one more example why I've got this small bit setup so that it's just a little bit short of the length of the screw so I can run a nice counter sink in so the head comes out flush on these narrow drawers that are three and a half inches I'll put one screw in the middle at an inch and three quarters and it's you eyeball a quarter inch in from the answer so that it ends up in the middle of that half inch thick plywood with precision parts the stuffs goes together just like I want it I can get that countersink and pilot hole going right in there and you can see that it comes out nicely in the end of that wood for a good firm hold when I lacquer these parts I put a piece of tape on the end to keep the finish off that so when I did a final assembly of the drawers the glue will hold those firmly together along with the screw and the drawer bottom providing strength that looks a lot less clumsy than that trying to do it for the front the back of the drawer is the one that I ripped the data off of and it can be installed upside down and if I throw a clamp on pause makes this just a little bit easier and I'm making sure it's flush on the top of the camera shy and quits right in the middle of a job so that's the first small drawer put together I'll do the same thing with one of the large ones then I can measure the size for those bottom panels I'll cut those out of quarter-inch oak veneer MDF and I'll show you how those get installed here in a few minutes with one wide and one narrow drawer box assembled I have dimensions of 14 and 7/16 front to back and then 33 and a half and 23 for width so using the same protocol for sizing big sheets into small ones that I used for the drawer boxes I'll do that on the rips for the bottoms I'll make three rips 14 and 7/16 and then cut them to appropriate length making the final pass on all the sides at the same time so that the drawer bottoms are consistent I'm starting with a 33 inch wide rip for one the bottoms here now get the other strip off of this side [Applause] I'll just freehand cut this end off rather than rip it in half and have smaller pieces of waste and I put a wavy mark on here so I know that this end needs to be true DUP [Music] what I'm doing with those steps is cutting enough so I can trim about an inch or 3/4 off the factory end and then also trim off that hand-cut end at thirty three and a half inches apparently my camera sagged in the process what I'm doing here is now that all these draw bottoms are cut to width the 14 and 7/16 I'm scoring up the ends on trimming off the wavy hand cut and trimming off about 3/4 an inch off the factory end I've got square ends on all this and the quarter inch plywood runs pretty true but I'll double check it just to make sure something didn't get off in the process because the squareness at the bottom will determine the squareness of the drawer and it has to be right on so all these are good I can cut them at 33 and a half scant [Music] [Music] I'm constantly checking and double-checking make sure everything's organized and square that's a good thing because I'm not crazy about those ends somehow somes gotten a little off on these pieces and I'll have to true them up with the joiner same as before because of the joining process I'm going to make these all 23 and a quarter and recut for a true straight end and I guess that just emphasizes the process and do it takes to get it square if I got to do it three times and if I overdo it or under to do it [Music] [Music] and naturally that's a bit monotonous too but what I end up with is precisely sized bottom panels for these drawers to make sure that they come out perfectly square for going in the cabinets without trouble and no surprise here I've got slight roughness on the corners from a table saw so I'll use 120 grit best block for demanding sanding and give all the edges a quick wipe so that they don't dig in when I put them into drawers with the first two drawer box frames assembled and the bottoms cut it's time for a moment of truth to see how we did just like that two times that's what I call just the way it ought to be so I'm gonna quickly screw the bottom in so you can see how that works and I think that'll just about be a wrap I guess it's pretty obvious by now that I don't use nails or pocket screws on drawers I I don't like nails because they can work themselves loose and it's too easy for them to split out I guess for some stuff that's fine but not this and the other thing I don't like is pocket screws I don't understand why people use pocket screws on drawers I'm screwing these ends together but as long as I lay out those screws and put them right in there nice and even they provide support and like metal dovetails they just belong there that's what holds the drawer together sounds like my battery got charged up but I also don't use nail screws or staples in the bottoms of the drawers for the same reasons I know I don't want them rattling and I don't want them splitting out I make the the parts accurate enough for the bottom and the drawer fits tight so this drawer won't rack with no screws in the front I'll put a little bit of glue in there when I put the thing together the final time so it so it doesn't vibrate like that but it's really not doing much for strength the joinery and the precision are what give the drawers accuracy consistency and strength plus a nice look so I use a smaller snappy bit and number 6 by 5/8 inch screws to hold the bottoms on I'll just do a quick layout not that it really matters I'm going to and 1/2 inches in from each end I'll pull one screw in the middle of 33 16 and 1/2 and one in between that a 14 so that's 7 that should do just make sure this drawer is all the way in and Center it up run those pilot holes and screws and yes that takes longer than going bambam bam-bam-bam with a staple gun but if you have one staple that splits out where does that put you and that's the procedure I use on all the wide drawers and all the narrow one for a nice sturdy drawer and then that rattling will go away when the parts are lacquered and I glue it up for the final assembly down to the point where I've just got two more drawers to pre assemble and I'll zoom in on the process that I'm using kind of switched it up a little bit to make this go quicker easier and more accurately the bottom drawers are the deepest so I'm using three screws in these inch and a quarter down four and a half down seven and a quarter down or seven and three-quarters down that spaces them out pretty well and I just duplicate that on all these end panels because of the tight fit of the joinery I could just snap these pieces together put in the back with the good side up like so and because everything is press fit I can set the whole assembly on the floor and I just make sure that the top edge here is perfectly flush before I drill the pilot holes and I can use these little number six by inch and a quarter square drive sheet metal screws to hold everything together by properly pilot holing and countersinking these they don't get any blowouts in the material just get a very very sturdy connection and these are aesthetically accurate tolerances for these screw placements but I can't take the side of this drawer and put it on the side of the narrow drawer like it just enough difference in the layouts that this is a one-off deal when I take the drawers apart to Sandeman lack room I just label everything so it goes all back together the way I took it apart for a run of eight drawers this is perfectly practical it was 800 it would be worth setting this up in a cnc to make these parts so that they would be universally connectable instead of specifically connectable like they are with my process these screws are just on the borderline of being undriveable if it was just a little bit tougher I'd either make a bigger pilot hole or I'd put some wax on the screws just a little bit tighter I'd probably be snapping off heads and that would not be acceptable because of the consistency and the parts the way they were made once the drawer body is screwed together I can just pick a bottom drop it down in there to complete the drawer and I've just got the widest deepest drawer left to do there's a little sawdust in those joints and I may have to do a little sanding to ease the pressure in there on the final assembly generally though I'm real pleased when the joints are this snug at this stage I can always loosen them up having the drawer stand on the floor like this really allows me to bear down with the drill and the driver and the joinery to get everything assembled tightly and in a hurry and that's the last of the drawer boxes for assembly so all's I have to do is screw the rest of the drawer bottoms into the backs to complete the build process and to screw in the rest of these bottoms I'll just go into mass production mode here since I want one screw two and a half inches in from each side on every piece I just made a block that's two and a half inches long but for that layout work that way I can make it nice looking with less effort then any other way with all the screw holes marked out I switched to the small snappy bit and number 6 by 5/8 screws for screwing these bottoms in and I just make sure that the drawer bottom is pushed all the way up to the front so that the drawers come out square when they're all done as long as I've got an even margin on the back that drawer front is driven all the way forward it's all good to go if I was to have an uneven margin here I checked the groove in the front for sawdust if chips get in there it can make things out of square so as long as the parts are true I know that an even margin tells me everything's going to come out right something doesn't line up I just look into it find out the cause and correct it and I really feel that by working fast and efficiently with the joinery that any extra time I spend screwing these together instead of blasting them in there with staples I've already gained early on in the project plus I have extra strength with the screws and I don't worry about callbacks for drawer bottoms busting out if nails or staples get knocked loose if these screws get knocked loose I'm gonna call that customer abuse I'll still fix it for him but it wasn't from me trying to cut corners one thing I take for granted when doing drawers this way with accurate parts and a systematic process for fabrication when I put the drawer together slip this bottom panel in there the George just come out perfectly square I don't have to hold them square and drive screws to hold them that way or shim or glue or nail it all the way around to get things squared up they're square from the get-go so the time I spend early in the process squaring up edges and making sure everything is accurate it pays off now because I can just put things together things slip together and come out as close to perfect as they can get without a bunch of extra fuss at this stage of the game it makes a lot more sense to do the fussing upfront so that the end game goes smoothly so I'm gonna finish with the screws in these panels I don't know if you can tell it in the camera but it is one hot humid night here at next-level carpentry so I'm gonna get these bottom screwed in and review the video I shot today making the drawers and decide how I want to wrap this up but I think I'll show you one of these drawers installed with that hardware to wrap up the video whoo dog feels like it's an August night in Georgia I use a two-step lacquer process for finishing these drawers the first coat basically acts as a self sealer and the second coat gives it a nice Sheen it's thick enough to protect the wood but not so heavy that it blots out the texture of the grain which gives it a nice look once all the parts are sprayed I gather them up and the preassembled or going by letters and numbers on each of the drawer parts that helps me line things up in a reverse order of the way they came apart by using screws to assemble the drawers I get a stronger end result and then I'm also able to disassemble them and use this finishing process so that there's no rough spots on the insides bottoms or backs of the doors when I'm done everything is smooth to the touch [Music] because I'm asked off the shoulder of this joint I've got a wood to wood glue up surface here for a nice strong bond [Music] and this is the only situation where I'll ever use water and a rag to clean up glue squeeze-out because the surface is already finished so it's not porous and can't absorb glue reassembly of the drawers is quick and easy and if I got my tolerances right all the way through the process that bottom slips right in there for a nice snug fit and the screws go right back in the holes as long as I use a Phillips tip instead of that number one square drive and rather than glue this bottom in to keep it from rattling I'll just put a very small bead of silicone around the bottom here to keep it from rattling but not lock it in place these little clip things are specific to Hettich and is the only hardware required to hold the drawer too it slides along with the two little holes in the back of the drawer it's secured for the soft-close hardware to work I've pre-drilled this with a 5/16 hole and then I use these washer head screws to hold the drawer box to the drawer front the difference in the diameter of the hole and the diameter of the shank on the screw is what gives me adjustability of the drawer fronts when the cabinet's installed on site that slight bit of movement on each of the four screws helps me line up all the drawer fronts with a nice even margin the drawer front is piloted so these screws go right into a pre-drilled hole and when I snug them down I can still adjust the drawer front before tightening the screws to hold it in place so drawl finish and reassemble I can drop it on to the hardware and have it into place you just gotta love it when a plan comes together right well anybody that's made it through to this point of the video has a pretty good idea of how I make professional-grade cabinet drawers I decided to leave this video one long segment instead of breaking it down into three sections so you could just see the whole process all in one place and I don't want to spoil my reputation for making long videos if you like what you saw here if you learned a few things I'd appreciate if you'd consider subscribing to next-level carpentry if you haven't already and poke the thumbs up button if you would and let YouTube know that there's stuff going on here at the channel a countdown to a hundred thousand subscribers continues which is pretty exciting and all of you contribute to that growth and I appreciate it to support the channel to make it viable and keep the growth going you can check out patreon where a growing list of viewers have gone above and beyond and signed up as patrons through patreon to support the channel a little bit of support and patreon goes a long way when measured by the yardstick of YouTube ad revenue so there's really some leverage there I'm supporting a next level carpentry t-shirt that you can get at teespring there's links right below the video or you can go to next level Carbon trees teespring site I'll put a link in the video description if you want to pick up any swag to show your support for the channel I've got a lot of work to do to finish finishing these cabinets and assembling and delivering and installing them I'll try to get some video once the closets all complete and installed and at least show a clip on the channel so the people that have seen the edge banding process and the drawer building process can see a little bit what the finished product ends up looking like and what the customers pay for these drawer fronts they're basically a flat panel I've got a video that shows how to make flat panel doors I use that exact process for making these flat panel drawer fronts for the drawers if that's something you're interested in checking out but I keep saying I'm going to wrap this up so until next time thanks for watching

Channel: Next Level Carpentry

Views: 2,086,487

Keywords: drawer, drawers, draers, droors, plywood, self-close, self, closing, dovetails, dovetail, lock joint, joinery, precise, precision, hettich, blum, fine woodworking, freud, router, table, rockler, box joint

Id: UMy5RGblxkY

Length: 80min 17sec (4817 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 28 2019