I’ve been planning this one since the Parametric assortment bins post at the beginning of the year.

Design

One of the big wins for this project was discovering a better workflow for laying out my part plates for routing.

I’m now placing my origin at the origin of my spoilboard and I have modeled my hold-down features which has given me an incredible confidence around being able to lay out and execute my plates while still holding the material down well.

Another big improvement to my process was learning that I can use a 2D Contour with Rest Machining enabled and the machining boundary set to Silhouette to cut the tabs. Be careful not to use Bounding Box. For me, it almost did the right thing but would miss 1 or two tabs. A keen eye will notice a face on the front of the drawers that I damaged after removing it from the router table due to me not noticing these sneaky tabs.

Thanks to a bit of pressure from Jason I adjusted my bin size to 50x50x50mm and judging by how many nearly empty 1x1 bins I have already, I think he was very right.

I’ve also created some tool specific variants but I plan on making some dedicated posts for those later.

Assembly

I did not give enough of a fitness tolerance to the inside of the drawers so I ended up having to do an extra relief operation on all the drawer sides. That led to it’s own mistake and I had a bit of an unsightly gap that I decided to wood fill and chisel to try to hide.

I had big plans to use brad nails and no clamps during glueing but it never seems to work out.

Ryan reminded me to include some extra gap for the slides and that was really smart because these drawer slides really need to “float” on their spring tabs for a smooth operation. I added 1/16" for each but I think with router precision I would have been better off with 1/32".

I finished this project with an oil based ARM-R-SEAL Satin from General Finishes. Just a single coat because I liked the raw plywood look.