Drawers
Drawer layout is dependent on panel design. Panel top and bottom reveals, slide offset, minimum slide clearances and face indexing all affect layout.
Drawer faces are always a multiple of 32mm tall, less reveal. Drawer faces can be indexed with their top and bottom edges (before reveal is subtracted) centered on ("System"), or between ("Shifted"), system holes.
Drawer Terms and Acronyms - basics
Full Overlay
Bottom Clearance - basics
Undermount - examples
Half Overlay/Flush Inset
Indexing Wood Drawer Boxes - basics
Center Indexed - examples
Indexing Wood Drawer Boxes
Balanced drawer boxes, like balanced panels, keep things simple. The following is a simplified version of the old How Wood Drawers Utilize System Holes article. Note: While the basic principles apply to all drawers, this is a fairly half-overlay/inset-flush centric article... Feb '10: added undermount slides... more
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Half Overlay Center Indexed
Half-overlay and flush-inset drawers work quite well with true center registration. All drawers have the same top and bottom box to face reveal. The one potential issue is that undermount drawer layouts work much better with shifted system holes and bottom mount layouts work much better when face edges fall on system holes. Note that center indexing bottom mount boxes only works with applied bottom drawer boxes. Side mount slides work either way.
The only difference between the half-overlay and inset flush layouts are that the system rows are moved back the thickness of the faces (or a tad less) and the drawer faces are 22mm shorter (and narrower, -11 all edges).
See also: Indexing Wood Drawer Boxes and Drawer Terms and Acronyms
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Full Overlay Bottom Clearance
Traditionally, 32mm drawer and door faces are indexed so that their top and bottom edges center on "System" holes. With half-overlay and inset cabinets (where most box components center on system holes), drawer layouts are relatively easy because all drawer openings are the same size (when drawer rails are used).
With full-overlay cabinets, the bottom drawer faces are flush with the box bottom (0mm reveal). What this means is that the bottom edge of the bottom drawer opening is 9.5-19mm higher than the rest of the drawer openings, i.e. is 9.5-19mm closer to a system hole. Because drawer slides are mounted to system holes, the bottom drawer clearance for all slides is determined by the bottom drawer. The reduced clearances caused by full overlay faces can complicate drawer layout... more
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Full Overlay Undermount
There are two drawings, one with layouts based on system hole registration and the other with layouts based on shifted registration. Both are based on fairly standard specifications.
Shifted (face edges between) system holes work best with undermount slides (any cabinet style). The first layout is straight 32mm system, the second a Plus 32. Both were drawn with drawer boxes sized in multiples of 32mm. The Plus 32 boxes could be up to 14mm taller (which may allow drawer front adjusters in the top rail). Using 32 x N + 5 would result in an easy to remember 32mm top B2FR. The third layout is as close as I can get center registration to work (the true center registration of HO/FI doesn't work). The fourth layout is Blum's Process 32 and is pretty worthless because there is no consistent relationship between the drawer boxes and faces.
None of the system hole layouts work quite as well. The straight 32mm system layout wastes a bit more space. The Plus 32 and first center indexing layout are better, but there's no room for drawer rails. The second center indexing option requires drilling mounting holes centered between system holes for all but the bottom drawers (opposite of the center indexed shifted layout).
See also: Full Overlay Bottom Clearance and Drawer Terms and Acronyms
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Drawer Terms and Acronyms
I've used so many acronyms in my drawings that I'm starting to confuse myself. Hopefully the following will help me to standardize them and help you to decipher my drawings. I'll try to come up with images of each, Indexing Wood Drawer Boxes has a couple.
Slide Offset (SO) - the distance from the slide system mounting hole to the ledge that the drawer box side or bottom sits on. Applies to all bottom and under mount slides. This is a primary variable when designing a drawer layout or in determining weather or not a manufacturers slide will work with a given layout.
Box Offset (BO) - the distance from the slide system mounting hole to the bottom of the drawer box (lowest point, typically the sides). Applies to all slides. With undermount's this is slide offset (SO) + lip (how much the drawer sides overhang the bottom of the box). With bottom mounts box offset (BO) is the same as slide offset (SO). Since side mounts have no slide offset (SO), this is the number that matters when designing side mount drawer layouts.
Face Offset - the distance from the slide system mounting hole to the bottom of the drawer face, 32 (x n) - 1/2r for system registration and 32 (x n) + 16 - 1/2r for shifted registration. Used for calculating B2FR (below).
Box to Face Reveal (B2FR) - the distance between the drawer box top/bottom and drawer face top/bottom. To be able to consistently register drawer boxes to faces the top and/or bottom B2FR needs to be the same for every drawer in every drawer stack. While it is possible to center register faces without having consistent top or bottom B2FR's, true center registered faces have equal top and bottom B2FR's. B2FR's can be calculated as follows:
Bottom B2FR = face offset - box offset
Top B2FR = face height - box height - bottom B2FR
Bottom Clearance (BC) - the distance from the slides system mounting hole to the bottom of the slide (lowest point). Used for determining slide to cabinet box bottom and/or rail/stretcher clearance. Will the slide work with the layout, will it be reasonably close to horizontal cabinet members. While slide specifications are usually fairly similar, some manufacturers slides won't work with some layouts. Salice under mounts with a BC of 30.5/42.5 VS the more standard 24/36 +/- are one example... At least one drawing has SBO (slide bottom offset) instead of BC.
Top Clearance (TC) - how much space is needed to install/remove the drawer box. While most slides specify at least a bit of top clearance, this is most important when designing bottom mount drawer layouts because 3/4 extension bottom mount slides need a relatively large amount of TC.
Bottom mount specifications for top clearance typically assume the drawer box depth is roughly the same as drawer slide length and that the drawer will be pulled straight out. Specifications less ~3.5mm will work but require tipping the drawer downward so that the back of the box can clear the carcase when the drawer box wheels go over the carcase wheels. Reducing box top clearance more requires making the drawer boxes shallower than the slides or using full extension slides, i.e. have it so that the drawer box wheels are past the counter top before the box is removed.
Box Side (BS) - the height of the box sides. Typically presented as some multiple of 32mm (plus a constant).
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