shop cabinets

[roger wiegand]

I'm FINALLY going to rebuild my miter saw station (four years after the move) and, at the same time do something about the jumble of stuff on all the shelves in the shop. I'm planning to build frameless cabinets with all drawers under the saw. The cases will be prefinished 3/4" maple plywood (including the backs), haven't decided what to make the drawers out of yet, probably baltic birch or appleply (3/4" sides, 3/8" or 1/2" bottoms depending on width). It's going to fit between a couple of posts, so I have room for four ~31" cabinets or five ~24" cabinets. Many of the drawers will be used for small parts, fasteners, and hardware; I expect many drawers to be fairly heavily loaded.

I've never done frameless cabinets before. Some of the plans I've seen employ a stretcher between each drawer (mimicking a face frame, it seems), some even a full dust shield. Others just have a completely open front. I'm thinking the stretchers aren't necessary given 3/4" ply construction with the cabinets then screwed together to give 1-1/2" walls to support the shelves Am I missing something?

Any comment on side vs undermount glides? I need full extension and am quite sure I don't want the crappy ones they used on my kitchen cabinets, but not much more than that. (I need to start replacing them as well, several have broken)

Anything else I should be thinking about?

[Jim Dwight]

I made my CMS/RAS station with cabinets similar to what you describe. I wanted them to be 38 inches high like my table saw. I started with a frame of pressure treated since they sit on concrete. On top of this, I put a box of 3/4 softwood (the last one was some pretty nice plywood from Chile that is $30/sheet at HD here). The top of this box is 31 inches so I can have a 7 inch high Paulk style worksurface for about 7 feet where there are no saws. I put scrap softwood under the saws to get them to the right height. I like this arrangement. The Paulk worksurface lets you store frequently used tools between the two layers of the worksurface. I have flush flip stops like Paulk puts in his total workstation. They work great and are very inexpensive and simple to make.

I make one 8 foot cabinet with four banks of drawers and another that's around 6 feet long with three banks of drawers. Both have single pieces of 3/4 separating the banks of drawers. On the second one, I used shallow dados to locate these pieces and it make the drawers work better than in the first one. I cut the dado with my PC router and my DeWalt track saw track. Nice way to do longish dados in good sized pieces of wood. My drawers slide on pieces of plywood that are 3/4 thich and about an inch wide screwed to the uprights. They are also in shallow dados. They slide well enough for me. I put pieces across the front too but they aren't structural. The drawers in the first cabinet are built of the same 3/4 plywood and put together with pocket screws. I dovetailed scrap softwood for the second cabinet. They look nicer but work the same. I varied the depth which worked out well. I really like the shallow ones. Easier to see stuff.