This 21 drawer cabinet had already been designed to hold my tools for building R/C airplanes. Those tools are mostly small and better suited for shallow drawers. Just a couple of days before I started construction a friend asked me if I wanted to buy his lathe. I did so a little redesign was needed. The significant changes to the original design were a stronger base instead of 3/4” plywood and a 3/8” ply back instead of the original .20” floor underlayment back.The carcass is 3/4” Purebond maple veneered ply. The base is made from 1-3/4” thick engineered beam ripped to 3-1/2” width. It sits on eight adjustable levelers because the concrete guys did me no favors in getting the floor flat. The drawers are made from 1/2” Purebond which is not nearly as nice as the unobtainable Baltic birch for drawer sides. The drawer bottoms are floor underlayment. The top is a 23” solid core door cut down to 63” long.The drawer false fronts are copied from a project I saw on YouTube. They're 3/4” MDF. The corners were rounded with a 1/8” radius bit and finished with thinned oil based Varathane, rolled on with a 4” soft woven roller. Early coats were thinned 2:1 and the last coats were thinned 10:1. Sanded before the first coat and before the last coat only. The full extension ball bearing slides were a marketplace find that helped offset the cost of the plywood.It's definitely been my most complex project to date. It does everything I had hoped.The finished project.The engineered beam foundation. The levelers couldn't be locked after the cabinet was complete so the base was leveled and the floor marked so it could be returned to the same place fairly precisely.The cabinet was built on sawhorses to make it easier on my body. With so many drawer slides they were all removed before taking the carcass off of the sawhorses. The slides alone weighed 60 pounds. Top and retractable casters installed. Due to the weight of the finished build, the lathe was installed and the cabinet moved to its final position before replacing the slides and drawers. A quick check to make sure things still fit after adding the 500 pound lathe to the cabinet. The drawers still worked smoothly. Detail view of the false fronts.
This 21 drawer cabinet had already been designed to hold my tools for building R/C airplanes. Those tools are mostly small and better suited for shallow drawers. Just a couple of days before I started construction a friend asked me if I wanted to buy his lathe. I did so a little redesign was needed. The significant changes to the original design were a stronger base instead of 3/4” plywood and a 3/8” ply back instead of the original .20” floor underlayment back.The carcass is 3/4” Purebond maple veneered ply. The base is made from 1-3/4” thick engineered beam ripped to 3-1/2” width. It sits on eight adjustable levelers because the concrete guys did me no favors in getting the floor flat. The drawers are made from 1/2” Purebond which is not nearly as nice as the unobtainable Baltic birch for drawer sides. The drawer bottoms are floor underlayment. The top is a 23” solid core door cut down to 63” long.The drawer false fronts are copied from a project I saw on YouTube. They're 3/4” MDF. The corners were rounded with a 1/8” radius bit and finished with thinned oil based Varathane, rolled on with a 4” soft woven roller. Early coats were thinned 2:1 and the last coats were thinned 10:1. Sanded before the first coat and before the last coat only. The full extension ball bearing slides were a marketplace find that helped offset the cost of the plywood.It's definitely been my most complex project to date. It does everything I had hoped.
The finished project.
The engineered beam foundation. The levelers couldn't be locked after the cabinet was complete so the base was leveled and the floor marked so it could be returned to the same place fairly precisely.
The cabinet was built on sawhorses to make it easier on my body. With so many drawer slides they were all removed before taking the carcass off of the sawhorses. The slides alone weighed 60 pounds.
