I finally found some more time to work on a cabinet for my “clean work” workspace and office. It’s going to have 80/20 aluminum framing, 2-3 banks of drawers, and a butcher block top. Right now the 2-bank frame is up, and my attention is turned towards the drawers.
I’m connecting Blum undermounted drawer slides to the aluminum framing in an unconventional way. Normally, there’s face frame mounting or side panel mounting. The T-slot channels don’t line up perfectly with the holes, so I came up with a solution – 1.5″ x 1.5″ thick hardwood vertical supports that are bolted to the framing, for the drawer slides to screw into.
It’s time to test things out.
It seems that everyone is unhappy with the confusing way Blum gives guidance as to the ideal dimensions for a drawer, and so I figured a test run would be prudent.
I cut my hardwood vertical supports too long, because I forgot to take into account the right angle supports that will be holding up a heavy top and unknown loads.
I cut my drawer bottom too short. Instead of taking away from one side and adding to the other, since the drawer front and back will be joined within the sides, I removed from both sides, making the width about 1″ too short.
But the blunders didn’t stop there.
I drilled pocket holes on the wrong side of the sides. And then I realize that I needed the pocket holes to be in the other pieces.
I cut notches into a side of the drawer, instead of the rear.
I think I found every single way I could have screwed up with this test drawer. But hey, it’s a test drawer.
What threw me off is that the drawers are wider than they are deep. Yes, this is common, but I’m more used to small boxes where the front and rear are narrower than the sides.
Measure twice, cut once?
Back in my How Do You Plan for a Project post, Fred mentioned Gantt charts and Pert charts, which seems like a good idea.
I have always done well working according to my chicken-scratch-on-a-page plans, sometimes going as far to create a sketchup model – such as when I built this birdhouse for a Craftsman thing – but this project seems more complex and the numbers are starting to get out of hand. Things will become even more chaotic if the test drawer is not perfectly sized and I need to make minute tweaks to the dimensions.
I think what threw me off was mixing up the sides and fronts. For the full build, when I’m batching out 14 drawers, I’ll label everything.
So once the test drawer is sorted out, I’ll draft up some better plans, better describing each and every step that needs to be done, and to which drawer component. If changes are made, it’ll go right on those plans, since I plan to expand the cabinet project once I have the first 2 banks (18″ and 24″ widths) completed.
So… what’s your greatest project blunder? Blunders? Am I alone in suffering blunder after blunder on the same project?