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Built in cabinet with slight drawer problem. Need help please.

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Keith Thomas

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73
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florida
This is something I just built. It needs another coat of paint which I wanted to do after instal. I basically designed it to go in the dead space on the side of a closet. Its 25" deep with full extension self close slides and the interior of the drawers are 16" wide so it provides lots of storage space. The bottom drawer is going to be used for filing ( this is basically our office) I need to do some drywall and base board then the closet doors go back on. And it still needs some knobs to dress it up a little. The case is home depot birch and the frame and fronts are home depot poplar. I was lucky enough to find some straight 1-1/2" poplar (straight enough) for the face frame so I didn't even have to rip it. Had to glue up the door panel and larger drawers.
My problem is some of the drawer fronts are hitting at the top first leaving a gap at the bottom. Similar gap on each side. the case was pretty square when I put it together. It was hard to put that 92" long case together by myself and keep it square. The drawers are square and the fronts are on flush with the drawer box.
So is there a way to fix this problem? Or is that acceptable looking? I think I rather fix it if its not to hard. I'd appreciate some input.
 

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glenn bradley said:
I would just raise the rear of the drawer glides slightly to adjust...
Click to expand...
That's what I would do, too. The guides usually have several elongated holes for adjustment. Take all the mounting screws out of the part that attaches to the drawer, then, using the elongated slots only, adjust until the fit is the way you want, then put screws in the other screw holes to 'lock' the guide in place.
 
That's the way I would repair it as well (adjust the slides), but I'm not sure I would do the repair. That cabinet is fairly narrow, very deep, and has rails between the drawers. reaching in there to adjust those slides is likely to expand your vocabulary quiet a bit. Now, if the cabinet can be removed (and the back removed) it would be easy enough to do...in that case it would be a piece of cake. So to me, it would depend if you can live with those gaps or not.
 
I'll give that a try. What is confusing me is I measured all the heights for the slides from the same spot; the bottom of the case. And I measured so the back of the slide would be the sam height has the front face frame member the slide rests on. The Bottom slides just rested on the bottom of the case. And the bottom drawer is the only one that worked out perfectly. They should have all turned out the same way because i measured all from the same point but the way it looks I would have had to measure incorrectly on each side of every drawer. I must be worse at this stuff than I thought.
 
I find it easier to cut some support(s) that the slides sit on. Do the uppers first, one side then the other, then you can cut the support(s) down for the nest set and repeat. The support(s) can be almost anything, but a piece of 3/4" MDF that's maybe 15" wide seems to work best for me. But it can be made of almost anything. But that's just me.
 
fred hargis said:
I find it easier to cut some support(s) that the slides sit on. Do the uppers first, one side then the other, then you can cut the support(s) down for the nest set and repeat. The support(s) can be almost anything, but a piece of 3/4" MDF that's maybe 15" wide seems to work best for me. But it can be made of almost anything. But that's just me.
Click to expand...
thats what i should have done. good idea
 
So you basically have a long lever with possibly an additional compounding factor on the front in that setup so even a very very small adjustment at the back could lead to a pretty big gap. The gap doesn't really look that big (say 1/8") and you say the drawers are 92" so.. lets (using rough numbers) say the screws are 3" in from the end that means you have 85-86" between the back screw and the front, so something like a 28x multiplier (85" behind the front screw divided by the 3" in front). If the glide is lower (say 1/3" of the way up the drawer) you somewhere between a 2x and 4x multiplier there as well (or none if it's centered). So assuming the glide is centered you could be less than a thousandth off in the back and the lever effect would cause a gap (0.128/28.0 = 0.0045).

Actual numbers are likely somewhat different but the point remains that a tiny adjustment in the back could have a large delta effect on the actual drawer angle. Like "drill for the pilot hole moves very slightly" or "screw moved the glide a smidge when you were tightening it" amounts could make the gap you see.

Short version: it's not that you're bad at this.. it's that very small changes have large effects here so that's why the glides are adjustable cause it's dang near impossible to get them spot on otherwise.
 
Ryan Mooney said:
So you basically have a long lever with possibly an additional compounding factor on the front in that setup so even a very very small adjustment at the back could lead to a pretty big gap. The gap doesn't really look that big (say 1/8") and you say the drawers are 92" so.. lets (using rough numbers) say the screws are 3" in from the end that means you have 85-86" between the back screw and the front, so something like a 28x multiplier (85" behind the front screw divided by the 3" in front). If the glide is lower (say 1/3" of the way up the drawer) you somewhere between a 2x and 4x multiplier there as well (or none if it's centered). So assuming the glide is centered you could be less than a thousandth off in the back and the lever effect would cause a gap (0.128/28.0 = 0.0045).

Actual numbers are likely somewhat different but the point remains that a tiny adjustment in the back could have a large delta effect on the actual drawer angle. Like "drill for the pilot hole moves very slightly" or "screw moved the glide a smidge when you were tightening it" amounts could make the gap you see.

Short version: it's not that you're bad at this.. it's that very small changes have large effects here so that's why the glides are adjustable cause it's dang near impossible to get them spot on otherwise.
Click to expand...
I think you may have made a mistake. Or I may have done a poor job of my description. the drawers are not 92". the case is 92" tall by about 17" Wide and about 25" deep. the drawers themselves are 24" deep by 16" wide various heights from 6" to 13" tall.
The gaps were about 1/8" at the bottom. The case has a 3/4" fixed shelf right above the top drawer ( the cabinet bottom) so what I did was measure from the bottom of the fixed shelf to the back of each slide and compared it to the front of each slide. The offending drawers were off from 1/8" to 3/16" at the back compared to the front so i raised the backs accordingly. They are not perfect now but much better. Except now I have adjust the drawer fronts which were perfectly spaced but are now a little off. I put some bumper pads on the drawers so there are small gaps again but they are all even now.
 
Keith Thomas said:
the drawers themselves are 24" deep by 16"
Click to expand...

Ok, so redoing my math (if the glide is centered), if it's 2-3" from the front screw to the drawer front and 18" from the rear screw to the front you're still at an 7-9x leverage advantage. It multiplies out a bit from there to the drawer front as well but I'm going to skip that cause it starts to make my head hurt - even ignoring that though, if you're even 1-1.5 hundredths of an inch off on the rear that'll give you around a 1/8" gap based on those measurements (the angles from the glide to the front make it a bit worse than that)

Point is that it's a super fussy detail to fit, not that it was a bad job by any means.
 
Ryan Mooney said:
Ok, so redoing my math (if the glide is centered), if it's 2-3" from the front screw to the drawer front and 18" from the rear screw to the front you're still at an 7-9x leverage advantage. It multiplies out a bit from there to the drawer front as well but I'm going to skip that cause it starts to make my head hurt - even ignoring that though, if you're even 1-1.5 hundredths of an inch off on the rear that'll give you around a 1/8" gap based on those measurements (the angles from the glide to the front make it a bit worse than that)

Point is that it's a super fussy detail to fit, not that it was a bad job by any means.
Click to expand...
wow. I never figured they would need to be that precise. Next set of drawers im going to try and be a lot more exact in my measurements.
 
Keith Thomas said:
wow. I never figured they would need to be that precise
Click to expand...

Vaguely remembered high school geometry still occasionally proves useful these many years later, if only as justification for why I'm not doing a better job heh.

I had a revelation a couple years back on "absolute" versus "relative accuracy", this was the result of reading way to much boring stuff and staying up to late with a group of other folks who do the same (we may have been indulging in doses of camaraderie as well :rolleyes:)

The basic gist is that you can measure very accurately to an absolute standard (a ruler, micrometer, etc..) or you can use relative measurements where you simply fit two parts to each other.

Absolute measuring (accuracy) is super useful for interchangeable parts or conveying measurement information between different people. However for one off handmade items it's often fraught with error (compounding errors, parallax errors, etc..) and requires a fair bit of technique and discipline to do correctly.

In contrast relative accuracy is less transferable but often easier to fit for a given piece. Freds technique for laying out the drawer spacing is a good example of relative accuracy. As is laying out a set of dovetail tails (or pins if you do tails first) from the other side.. or a mortise laid out from the tenon, etc.. The drawer layout is perhaps a bit more fussy than tails from pins as you still have to maintain drawer front spacing (but there are, of course ways to address that as well.. relatively speaking).

A bit after this happened Lost Art Press published "By Hand & Eye" which explained it a whole lot better than I'm able to.
 
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