If you are newer to woodworking and are feeling a bit uneasy about installing Soft Close Full Extension Drawer Hardware, this article will show you a few tips along the way that will take away most of that doubt ... hopefully.
The first thing when installing drawers hardware is to either have the hardware in your hands or know for certain what the width of the hardware is, if any, because you will need to know this in order to construct the actual wooden drawers.
All of the full extension drawer hardware I have ever used requires a half (1/2") of clearance on each side of the drawer for a total of one inch (1") clearance. So if your opening you want to install drawers into is 18 inches wide, your actual drawer will need to be 17 inches wide (and how ever long you need to fit into the cabinet)
You will also want to know ahead of time if you want the drawers "Inset" or "Raised" as this will help you determine where the hardware sits on your actual drawer. Inset drawers are what I made, see below, notice how they are inset into the cabinet. Raised drawer fronts are those that butt up against the outside of the cabinet.
Some drawer hardware is designed to be attached to the bottom of the drawer, that is the outside bottom edges. The type I used can be attached anywhere on the side of drawer and often the cabinet as well, but that is why it's best to have the cabinet done first so that you can make sure the place you want to attach the drawer hardware is compatible with your cabinet construction.
In my case I could attach the hardware any where on the side of the drawer or the cabinet.
As you can see in the video, I simply used a carpenter's square with a piece of wood I ripped a very thin dado in, and that served as the jig to make sure that the hardware would be attached square to the front face of my cabinet, and then used the jig on both sides to make sure the hardware was in the same place on both sides.
If you look at the picture below and the drawer slide hardware you will see that there are many different places that screws can be attached, some or round holes, some slotted vertical and some slotted horizontal. All of these are options for you to use, you don't need to drive screws in to every hole. If you think you may want adjust the drawer up or down, use the vertical slots, if you think you may need to adjust front to back use the horizontal slots and you can even switch if one is better than the other. Then attach the hardware to the cabinet FIRST as this will give you a better guideline of where the hardware needs to be attached to the wooden drawers.
Remember, the center holes to the slide attached to the cabinet will align to the center holes on the slide that attaches to the drawer, so from that you can easily figure out how high or low you want your drawer to sit by simply measuring the the hole position on the cabinet and replicating that measurement on the drawer.
The nice thing with installing drawer hardware, if you don't like it, it's a simple matter of undoing a few screws and starting over. It's not like you have to make a whole cabinet and look at all the cool things you learned along the way, just like all woodworking, it's a learning process.
Copyright Colin Knecht
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