Dresser Design/Slides Help

[jteneyck]

Blum's website has everything you need to know.  You can download the design and installation instructions for whichever slides you are interested in.  

John

[Hank Knight]

That's a very nice chest of drawers. Did you have to make the drawer box depth specific to the slides? From what I read, it sounds like you have to make the drawer boxes a specific size in increments of 3".

Sorry for the tardy response. I've been immersed in tax documents for several days.

John is right, everything you need to know is on the Blum web site. The undermount slides require specific clearances; and as John mentioned, you lose quite a bit of vertical capacity (drawer depth). You are not restricted to 3" increments. As long as you allow the necessary clearance, the drawer can be any size you want it to be.

Blum recommends buying their jig for drilling holes in the drawers to mount the slides. It's fairly expensive, but I bought it since I'd not used these slides before. I don't know whether it's absolutely necessary, but it certainly made mounting the slides easy. Now I have it and I'll use it again.

Thanks, all for the compliments on my chest of drawers. It was a fun project for my daughter and son-in-law. It was designed to fit in the alcove in their bedroom, and it fits pretty well. The drawer fronts are solid hard curly maple. I bread-boarded the ends to allow for seasonal expansion and contraction. I'm glad I did. The range of motion of the largest drawer is almost 3/16" and the others aren't far behind. The bread boards have kept the drawer fronts very flat.

Good luck with your project. Post photos as you go. Inquiring minds are interested.

Hank

[lincmercguy]

I bought one set of Blum slides for 15" drawers.  It helped having an actual set of slides to verify what I calculated from their instruction sheets.  I made the depth of the design a bit deeper to accommodate the minimum cabinet depth.

Currently, I'm just planning to have the drawers the same size/spacing.  I haven't figured out all of the details of the inner construction.  I think I'll make an interior frame and panel for each separator just out of maple and plywood to give it some more structure.  Would 1/4" plywood be enough for the back?  I think I just need to enclose it, not provide any structure with it.  It would take a lot of expensive material to make the back as "nice" as the sides, and no one will see it.


If I use 1/2" material for the drawer sides and 1/2" plywood for the bottoms, the interior drawer box dimensions would be 30 3/8" wide x 6 7/16" tall x 14" deep.  It may seem a bit on the small side, but this dresser will have a specific space in which to fit.