Box for MicroFence Stuff

[Mike Henderson]

I've owned some of the MicroFence stuff for a good many years. It's one of those products that you don't use a lot, but it works very, very well when you need it. Recently, I bought some additional parts of the system and decided that I needed a better storage system for it than the cardboard box that its been sitting in. So I built a three drawer box. The box is sized to fit into a space in one of my cabinets, AND be large enough to hold the components. The drawers wound up about 18" inside, about 8.5" deep and about 3" high. It's built from some scrap Baltic birch plywood I had and it's put together with the 4mm dominoes.

Here are some pictures:

The outside of the box.
MicroFence box-01.jpg

I lined each of the drawers with some felt left over from a previous project.
MicroFence box-02.jpg

The bottom drawer holds the main component, plus the circle jig set up.
MicroFence box-03.jpg

The middle drawer has the edge guide and the router guide for Festool rails.
MicroFence box-04.jpg

And the top drawer is miscellaneous other stuff.
MicroFence box-05.jpg

Mike

[Phil Thien]

That looks great. Did you use wood slides for the drawers?

[Mike Henderson]

Yes, I put a cleat above the bottom two drawers. So the bottom drawer runs on the bottom of the box, but the drawer is "captured" by the cleat above the drawer side. The sides of the bottom two drawers are 1/2" down from the front to allow for the cleat. The top drawer runs on the cleat above the second drawer and is "captured" by the top of the box. So the sides of that drawer are the same height as the front of the drawer. I rubbed everything with paraffin to make it slide well.

The material of the sides of the drawers is too thin (about 10mm) to do a dado in it and use a more traditional wooden slide. At least, I though my solution was better than doing the dado approach. It also makes it easy to install the cleats. I put the bottom drawer in, put some glue on the cleat, and laid it on top of the side of the drawer. I did this before putting the back on so I could use spring clamps from the front and back to hold the cleat in place until the glue set. Did the same for the middle drawer.

Mike

Here's a view into the side of the box, showing the two cleats - duplicated on the other side. The cleats also serve to limit how far the drawer goes into the box, to keep the front aligned with the front of the box.
MicroFence box-06.jpg

Here's a view with the bottom drawer inserted.
MicroFence box-07.jpg

And here's a picture showing the top drawer, on the left, with full size sides, and the middle drawer, with short sides. If I needed stops for the top drawer I was going to put felt on the back of the drawer in a thickness to give alignment. Turned out I didn't need to.
MicroFence box-08.jpg

[Terry Beadle]

Good design. Very classy and direct to the needs.

Good Job!