Drawers: Why use a false front? I want a real front!

[mugget]

Hi folks,

A quick question about building drawers - just about everywhere I've looked, people use false fronts. Construct the drawer box, all equal height and same width front-to-back. Then attach an oversize false front of the appropriate size.

I had to ask: instead of doubling up on the front drawer panels, why not just use one piece of wood that is the correct size for the cabinet? Are false fronts used for ease of construction?

This is the basic method I was planning to use:



This will be my most notable woodworking project since shop class in high school so I thought I would keep it simple. I thought why not just use a piece of 19mm ply for the front, and route the correct shape so it mates to the side panels? Maybe a few nails in the front, but I will be painting them anyway.

The other reason is that I want to use Southco M1 latches, so the maximum material thickness ranges from 19-22mm depending on the latch. I figure that I will avoid extra work if I just use a single front panel on the drawer. (The drawers will be part of a workbench in my van, which is why they need to be lockable.)

Cheers for any comments!

[Thylacene]

From my limited understanding, false drawer fronts are primarily for aesthetic purposes and are easy to finish. It allows the face of the drawer to be adjusted easily and allows you to cover/hide slides and carcass.

It depends on your purpose and your design. joining the fronts to the drawers with nails is not the best idea, as nails offer no real strength, and will pull out. Cheap and nasty furniture uses dowels, a through mortice with wedges is better if you need to extend the sides to cover slides on the sides but not always attractive. Rebated slides and a blind dovetail offer a more attractive finish.

If it was me building drawers for a work truck I would probably use dowels & glue, extend the sides of the drawer front to cover the slides (assuming they are side mounted) and screw pryda angle brackets inside the front corners to provide the strength needed. But then I am also a chainsaw carpenter.

It really depends on the fit and finish you want to achieve, if it was a chest of drawers for the house and I wanted a single panel face I might go with dovetails, through or blind depending on the look I wanted, and forego slides in favour of runners and rebates, but you lose the ability to open the drawers to the full extent.

There are a multitude of ways to end up with a single panel face, with varying degrees of effort associated with each method, if you really want to spend the time, sliding dovetails in the face to slide onto the sides is quite effective, but effort intensive, and still allows the face to be larger than the drawer box to hide slides and rails as you need.

As with anything the eternal triangle comes into play, time, cost & quality, adjust any one and the other must move, your time is money, money is cost.

[mugget]

Cheers Thylacene.

Ahhh, the eternal triangle... haha. Good idea on the angle brackets! I will see how sturdy the drawers feel, may add in the brackets if it looks like they're needed. They won't be super heavy duty drawers though.

The nails - I just meant small nails like shown in the video, just to hold everything while the glue dries. Or maybe I'll just clamp it. Most of the strength comes from glue acting on a large surface area, I remember that much from shop class! But I'll see how it goes.

[auscab]

I didn't watch the video but will just say why I like false fronts sometimes .
super fast drawer construction !
You can nail or screw up a box with a nailed on bottom and that as a drawer looks crap . slap on a false front and it looks good .
It self aligns when closed if the box is a little loose .

I do workshop storage drawers this way at times.
I'm planning on some multi drawer cabinets that the ladies will fall in love with, with slap on fronts as well . a little more refined though . Designed to get them spending cash I hope .

[Sir Stinkalot]

I would think that doubling up the front would be handy when doing dovetailed drawers (for strength) and then adding a decorative front to hide the edge of the dovetail.
Many different ways to go about it and it would depend on the quality required, look and purpose. I would be making the drawer as a complete box fitting all of the slides and then coming back and making fronts to suit.

[rrich]

Using the false front technique is just so much easier to achieve an aesthetically pleasing look with a stronger drawer box.

[IanW]

There is nothing to stop you from building drawers with integral overlapping fronts, if false-fronts offend you. You can rebate the sides & cut your dovetails into the rebate. I've done it a couple of times, & it's a bit more involved than cutting non-rebated half-lapped dovetails, but definitely do-able. The most awkward part is marking the pins off the tails, which calls for a long, fine scratch-awl or something similar to get in there. Drawers for 'traditional' furniture are most commonly inset, i.e. sides are flush with the front, though there have been periods when overlapped fronts were used, & the few I've seen were done as described.

Imo, false-fronts are the go for 'utilitarian' furniture, for all of the reasons already stated. It's the simplest way of achieving significant overlap where the front has to be wider than the drawer, in order to cover edges of the carcase &/or metal drawer slides, etc. Being able to align the fronts, when the drawers themselves are a bit off (as with many kitchen drawers I've seen!) is a bonus.....

Cheers,

[derekcohen]

I had to ask: instead of doubling up on the front drawer panels, why not just use one piece of wood that is the correct size for the cabinet? Are false fronts used for ease of construction?

The only reasons to use false fronts for drawers are:

1. easier - and they can hide a multitude of sins.

2. quicker - they tend to go on mass-produced or low-priced pieces.

3. cheaper - the skill set needed to create such drawers is lower than the skill set needed for "traditional" half-blind dovetailed drawers.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[ian]

A quick question about building drawers - just about everywhere I've looked, people use false fronts. Construct the drawer box, all equal height and same width front-to-back. Then attach an oversize false front of the appropriate size.

I had to ask: instead of doubling up on the front drawer panels, why not just use one piece of wood that is the correct size for the cabinet? Are false fronts used for ease of construction?

you could, but the skill set required -- cutting half blind dovetails at the inside end of a 19mm wide rebate -- is quite high compared to planting a false front on a simple drawer box.

This is the basic method I was planning to use:



This will be my most notable woodworking project since shop class in high school so I thought I would keep it simple. I thought why not just use a piece of 19mm ply for the front, and route the correct shape so it mates to the side panels? Maybe a few nails in the front, but I will be painting them anyway.

it's very unlikely that a drawer front attached to the drawer sides with nails or even screws would survive very long.

for what you intend building -- utility drawers below a workbench -- it's very hard to go past the construction shown in the video.

[mugget]

Thank you everyone for your comments. It all makes sense now, I will keep it simple and build the drawer exactly as shown in the video - standard box with a false front.

The only difference is that I will need to modify the front of the drawer to accommodate a latch, which can be installed into material with a maximum thickness of 22mm. If going by the materials used in the video I would finish up with a box constructed with 19mm ply, and 19mm ply for the false front. Total of a 38mm panel on front of the box - pretty hefty!

Any suggestions to reduce that thickness? Using a thinner ply for the box front and the false front? Or just leave it at 19mm ply throughout and route the required shape to achieve a 22mm thickness for the latch installation?

Also I don't think it was mentioned in the video - how should the false fronts be attached? Just screwed from inside the drawer, using glue on the mating faces?

[Handyjack]

I would consider screwing the false front on, and that is where having a thicker front can have an advantage.
Depending on how you are making it, I would not go less than 12mm on the draw (box) front.

[John Samuel]

Not long after I started wood working I went looking for a method of making drawers that was strong and pretty, but which did not require the skills or time that dovetailing involved. Generally, I don't like false fronts that cover the frames, although this method is used occasionally.

Below is a pic of my solution.

I make the components and cut a rebate into the sides of the drawer front. Then the drawer is assembled with glue and screws. The screws are temporary clamps only. Once the glue has set, the screws are pulled and holes for dowels are drilled using the screw holes as pilot holes. Dowels are glued into place, trimmed and sanded. Sometimes I stain the dowels by standing them on end in a shallow tray of stain.

[IanW]

.... Once the glue has set, the screws are pulled and holes for dowels are drilled using the screw holes as pilot holes. Dowels are glued into place, trimmed and sanded....

Haven't used this method to make a drawer from scratch, John, but have used it a number of times to repair an old drawer with broken pins. At least one drawer I 'fixed' this way has stood up for 20 plus years.

If you use an appropriately-sized dowel, and enough of them, I can't see why dowelling the sides wouldn't be at least as strong as dovetails. And the thought just occurred to me, that by using dowels of different diameters, & partially overlapping the holes, you could produce some interesting patterns, further enhanced by your pre-staining technique....

Hmmm, an idea I'll file for future use....
Cheers,

[mugget]

I like that dowel idea a lot!

All this talk about dovetails... everyone knows that the drawers that I'm talking about, as shown in the "simple shop storage cabinet" video only uses rabbets to create the box, a groove for the bottom to slide into and that's it?

I think I will just add the dowel in addition to the method shown in the video, makes sense that it would make everything much sturdier.

Would you use plain round dowel, or fluted dowel? And if you used 8mm dia. dowel, you would drill an 8mm hole, right? That would provide a fairly tight fit anyway, but you'd be using glue on top of that?

[John Samuel]

Would you use plain round dowel, or fluted dowel? And if you used 8mm dia. dowel, you would drill an 8mm hole, right? That would provide a fairly tight fit anyway, but you'd be using glue on top of that?

I generally use a 10 mm clean-cutter drill bit and 10 mm fluted dowels. The piece in the pic uses three dowels at 10 mm and two at 6 mm. If I want the glue to set quickly I drop the dowels in a bucket of water for a few seconds, wipe them off so they are only damp and use Selley's fast setting PU glue. The piece in the pic is ten years old, and the drawers are like new.

Some experiments with Ian's idea of making a pattern with the dowels have been done. To get all all fancy I found a wider than normal board was required for the drawer front in most cases.

The other thing I do is to screw the drawers together, wipe off excess glue carefully, slide the drawer in to the cabinet and wedge it in place from the top and sides. This ensures a perfect fit with the runners.