Clamping station for drawers

[chet jamio]

I have 28 drawers to assemble for the shop. All four corners are locking rabbets, and the bottoms are in dados. All material is 1/2" ply. Sizes range from 10x10 to 24x32. I plan to glue the rabbets and the drawer bottoms.

I have plenty of Jet parallel clamps, so that's not an issue. For this many drawers, I'm thinking it will be faster to use a jig to make all the drawers square. Maybe something as simple as some scraps attached to a plywood base. I could use the jig to glue, square, and clamp each drawer. Then I would have to remove the drawer without racking it (how hard is this?). I'm sure someone has a slick idea for gluing these drawers.

[Jim Becker]

Seems to me that it would be easy to do a basic alignment jig as you describe to get the drawers square, but you'll still want to clamp them unless you're willing to temporarily clamp and use some 23 gage pins to keep things in place. If you do the alignment jig, consider accommodating wax paper or a slick coating to avoid any issues with inadvertent glue drips, etc.

[John Schreiber]

I have a similar project scheduled for the future and I plan to use pocket screws both for extra reinforcement and to make clamping unnecessary. I'll add a false face to the front of the drawer and the pocket screws will only be visible if you look at the back. Not for fine furniture, but should work great in the shop.

[Bill Arnold]

Chet,

Interesting parallel - I'm starting the same type of project. I did one drawer today and have 30 more to do. Like you, I'm using lock rabbets for the four corners and am gluing the bottom. When I've had a number of drawers to do on previous projects, I cut all the parts to fit well, add glue to the dadoes and press everything together by hand. When doing large batches, I do as Jim suggested and pin each corner and maybe add a pin on each side depending on length.

I like to have my slides in place on the cabinet so, after assembling and gluing, I add the slides to the drawer bottom and slip the assembly in place in the cabinet. The pins hold the corners until they're set and the slides help keep the box from spreading.

[Bill Huber]

When I started out making my shop cabinets I just had to make 8 drawers but the way I did it was as follows.

I made the jig below it is just some 3/4'' MDF and some scrap 4/4 red oak I had left from another project.

I used 3/4'' pine for the sides and 3/16'' masonite for the bottom of my drawers. I used locked rabbet for the corners. I put glue on everything and then put it in the jig and use Quick Grip clamps to pull the wedges together. I then used 4 parallel clamps on the top to pull it up tight.

I then loosened the wedges and pulled the drawer out and set it aside. Got the next drawer ready and set it aside, by this time I could pull the clamps off the first one and so on...

Now I am making another cabinet and pulled the old jig back out and am using it to make 4 more drawers.

All of my drawers are the same size but there is no reason you couldn't do the same thing only move the backing boards to fit the next size drawer.

102482

[Peter Quinn]

I would think if your plywood bottoms are square they should help square up the drawers during assembly. You could create a couple of square plywood L braces that can be clamped with spring clamps (the outside corners of the L's mitered off) to the inside of each corner during assembly to help get things together quickly. I've done that before on small boxes and big drawers, seems to help. You only need to leave them in clamps for about 1/2 hour, so if you have a few sets of clamps you can get in a rhythm that keeps one box going into clamps while one is coming out.