Sizing drawers

[Jesse Tutterrow]

I am planning on building some drawers in my garage for holding misc parts (electrical fittings, plumbing fittings, some quite heavy). They would be about 16 inches wide by 20 inches deep and 10 inches high.

I was considering using some left over (import) 3/4 cabinet plywood for the sides and 1/4 inch ply for the bottom. I was going to use the lock rabbit drawer joint that Wood magazine demos in their videos.

Should I use a 1/4 rabbit or move up to 3/8?

Would 1/4 inch plywood as bottoms be enough or should I move to 1/2?

In general is there any stand rule-of-thumb for sizing the thickness of drawer sides, fronts and backs, and bottoms?

How about the dado / rabbit size?

Thanks in Advance

[Andrew Pitonyak]

Sounds like you may have a lot of weight for 1/4" ply, that is pretty thin and flimsy.

[Alan Schwabacher]

Those are reasonably big drawers for heavy stuff -- I would use 1/2" thick bottoms. If your plywood front is 3/4" thick, the 1/4" dado blade kerf should give a correctly sized lock rabbet joint. Using 1/2" or 3/4" stock in the sides does not matter to the width of the kerf because the problem would be weakening the fronts. Cutting the kerfs a bit deeper because of the thicker sides is fine, but probably not needed, except to make sure the front still fully covers the edges of the sides.

[Jesse Tutterrow]

I should mention that the fronts are false fronts. I plan to place solid wood fronts on the drawers.

--Jesse

[John Morrison60]

For very deep drawers that will likely hold a lot of weight, I use 3/8 ply bottoms.
1/4 ply will hold a lot of weight, and I use it for any drawer 6" or less in depth.

I have made a lot of shop drawers and not a fail yet.
I would caution you to first get your drawer glides, so that you can build to the glides requirements.
Many drawer glides (most Blums) that are bottom mount, have a maximum of 5/8 thickness sides.

Good luck
John

[Chip Lindley]

Ditto, 3/8" bottoms. 3/4" ply is plenty strong stuff for heavy drawers. Make sure you have 100% glue surface at the corner joints AND bottoms, regardless of joint style.

[Russell Sansom]

Yep, big drawers. I assume you're considering drawer slides. Otherwise, a puppy that size can get hard to pull out. I've retro-fitted some of mine. I used Accuride side mounts and let them into a groove in the drawer sides 1/2" minus a hair deep... 1/2" being the width used up on each side by many side-mounts. Blum premium bottom mounts are more complicated. If you're doing them from scratch, I concur about getting the slides first and building around them.

[Jim Rimmer]

Part of this topic has been covered before - specifically the depth (or height) of the drawer. Unless you have items that need a 10" high drawer, I would make them smaller. Deep drawers tend to lose stuff at the bottom. Just my opinion and it's worth what you paid.

[Von Bickley]

I would use 1/2" baltic birch for the side and bottoms.....