Of Course this Kitchen is Getting Handcut Dovetailed Drawers

Welcome back to our home renovation! This time I’m going to work on the thing I’ve been looking forward to the most since the beginning: drawers, because I love dovetails. For right now, I am focusing on just the straight-forward drawers. 

I’ve probably built hundreds of drawers in my life, but I Have never used undermount drawer slides before. I already mocked up and built out one full drawer just to get a feel for how to use these slides. 

As a quick overview of the drawer, it has a knob pull. The front is the same thickness of the face frame, and that is a piece of maple which will be painted just like the face frames. The boxes themselves are white oak and they’re 5/8 of an inch thick. They have three dovetails in the front and in the back. The bottom is a piece of half inch white oak plywood. 

The slides come with diagrams, and I spent some time with this to figure this out. Like most people say, with these undermount slides, they seem challenging and complicated at first, but once you go through the process once, it just all clicks and makes sense. 

I’m going to start by making the boxes, which I will make with the leftover white oak from the flooring. This is mainly cathedral grain plane-sawn with maybe some quarter-sawn stock in here as well. Perfect for a bunch of drawer boxes.

After getting this stack planed, I’m ripping some parts on the table saw. 

The length of the sides of the boxes is dependent on the slides. This slide is 21 inches, which will be for a 24 inch base cabinet. The hutch drawers will have 15 inch slides. The actual length of the sides themselves is based on what joinery you do. I’m doing through dovetails, so my sides are those exact lengths. 

All the parts are cut to length now, so I’m going to move on to the groove for the bottom. The slides occupy a half inch from the bottom of the drawer sides to the drawer bottom. I’m using a half inch panel for the bottom, so the top of the groove that’s going to house that bottom panel needs to be an inch from the bottom edge of the side. I’m going to set my fence here to 7/8, and that’s going to give me a starting point of one inch to the top of the groove. I’m going to cut a quarter inch wide groove by 5/16 of an inch deep, and I’m going to do that in just a couple passes here with the ripping blade. 

Here is all of my stock. I’m sorting through to organize my sides into left and right sides. 

Now it’s time to cut all the joinery. It’s all going to be dovetailed, which I will be cutting using my normal style of dovetailing. People will get on my case a little bit because I use machines for some of the bulk work, but all the finesse work is done with hand tools. I’m going to use the bandsaw to batch cut all the sides with the exact same tail pattern, and I’ll do a symmetrical pattern. The only thing different with my layout is that I want my groove to fall inside one of the tails. Since this is through dovetails on all sides, I’ll have a little gap in the front, which doesn’t matter because the applied front is going to cover it. 

I’m going to do three tails, and the bandsaw is going to make these spacings the same and symmetrical.

I removed a bit of the waste at the saw, and now I can finish the cleanup at the bench.

I’m going to iterate through each individual drawer. So I’ll join the front, and then cut and join the back of one drawer, and then move on to the next one. 

After cutting the pin board for the back, I can get the tails laid out. 

This is drawer number 12. As you can see behind me, it’s been a productive weekend. 

Here are the slides, which are the Salice F70. They are a 70 kilo rated slide, which means that when my drawers are installed, I can stand in all of them holding a bucket of water and the drawers will be fine. On the bottom side, there is a rack and pinion set-up, so that when the two slides are linked together with the drawer front, they can’t rack because one can’t move out more than the other side, which is nice. The soft close is also very smooth, which I liked. The slides themselves were $38, plus the clips and screws to attach the drawer box to the slides, which are a separate and additional cost. 

So I’m going to start installing some slides. I’m just going to put two screws in for now, then when I actually get the drawer boxes in and feel a little more confident, I’ll put several more in. As far as in and out position, these slides get set in eighth of an inch back from the finished face. 

The install on these guys is going to be a little bit different. Some of these openings are flush to the face frame and some are not, so the ones that have a step will need to be padded out. 

I’m going to roll into the next batch of drawers, which are the upper banks that are five-inch drawers. Just like the others, these are through dovetails, so the process is the same. And now I have 17 dovetailed drawers in my stack. 

With all the joinery done, I’m going to be doing the sanding, glue-up, and finish prep of all the boxes. One tip for sanding is to avoid sanding the tails and pins because you will introduce gaps when your boards come back together. Once I get the sanding done, I can go over to the assembly table and glue them together and make sure the box is actually square. And then once it comes off of the assembly table, it can go into the queue for finish sanding on the outside. Finish sanding is primarily going to be flushing up the joinery, getting the outside up to final sanding grit, and breaking the edges. 

For finish on these, I’m going to use water based finish. This will take a lot of the yellows out of this white oak and match what I did on the island. I’m also using this to get rid of it, because I have no other use for it, and these are $80 a jug. Then I will use a water-based topcoat. The nice thing about using a water-base on top of a water-base sealer is that I don’t have to worry about blotching. 

I also have the stock for the drawer bottoms, which I am going to pre-finish those in the full sheets. That way I can go back to the shop, cut the bottoms, install them, and they are done. 

I’m going to start putting in drawer bottoms now. I’m going to organize my drawers by footprint size, because a lot of them should have a lot of the same size drawer bottoms. That means I can run through and batch cut, which should make the process go a little bit quicker. Once the bottoms are cut to size, I can just put a rabbet on the bottom and then they should slide right into place. 

I wasn’t able to get half inch white oak with a veneer core. To do a veneer core, I’d have to go up to three quarters of an inch thick, which would be absolutely ridiculous for drawer bottoms. So unfortunately these are MDF core, which I’m not super excited about. I’m sealing up the exposed MDF edges with some polyurethane. I’m using an oil base for this, because if I use a water base to seal this, it’s just going to swell the MDF, and it’s going to change the fit of my rabbet into my grooves. 

These slide on pretty nicely. One benefit of this style of bottom is that they are easy to replace should anything happen to them in the future. 

Now I need to get these drawers ready to receive the slides. All I need is a hole in the back to engage with the little hook that’s on the back of the slide as it actually holds the drawer box to the slide. 

Next up are the clips, which clip the drawer to the slide. These are available in a few different configurations. This style has pocket hole style holes to get into the drawer front.

These clips also have adjustments, which are controlled with these dials. One of them moves the box left or right and the other moves it in or out. There is also an adjustment to move the whole box up and down on the slide. 

The slide is engaged by the clip, and the big orange tab can be pushed to disengage the slide from the clip. 

After getting these clips installed, I can get these drawer boxes in. 

Now I’m working through all of my drawer faces. 

The next thing I want to do is drill the holes for the hardware into these drawer fronts. The top drawers just get a single knob, and the ones below have a handle with a hole spacing of four inches. 

After painting these drawer fronts and re-installing them, that takes care of the basic drawers! The next time I get back into drawers, I’ll be doing some of the more weird, complicated ones. 

Thank you as always for joining, I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on making a bunch of drawers for your kitchen, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. And until next time, happy woodworking!