Drawer

Also called: drawer construction, drawer runner

A drawer is a box that slides in and out of a piece of furniture, running on rails or slides fixed inside the carcase, the fixed frame it sits within. Its front is the part seen and handled; its sides, back and bottom hold it together and guide its travel.

The front and its joint

A drawer's front is jointed to its sides so that no end grain, the surface left where wood is cut across its fibres rather than along them, shows at the front. As Fairham (1920) put it, 'it is not permissible to allow the end grain of the timber to show at the front of a drawer, and this is why lap-dovetailing is resorted to.' Lap-dovetailing, sometimes called a half-blind dovetail, is a dovetail joint cut so that one board's end grain is hidden behind a thin lip on the mating board, rather than showing right through as it would in a plain dovetail. Elsewhere on the drawer the same care is not usually taken: a joint is usually kept out of sight at the front, though a well-cut dovetail looks fine left showing on the side. The front is usually made thicker than the sides. A cheaper alternative way of joining the front is slot-dovetailing. A bevelled front makes the drawer's top edge rise slightly as it closes, forming a tight closed joint. Some drawers instead take a false slab front, a separate front panel screwed on from inside the drawer. Fronts also differ in how they sit within the piece of furniture around them. In a survey of Shaker workbenches, most drawer fronts overlapped the carcase on a rabbeted stop, a step cut around the front's edge that laps over the opening, but on these particular workbenches the fronts instead sat flush within the frame, an arrangement thought to have been chosen mainly because it is far simpler to make, and one that has to be built carefully to avoid unsightly gaps.

Sides, back and runners

In solid-wood construction, the grain direction is planned to span across the drawer, running from one side piece over to the other. An older method of hanging a drawer, cutting broad grooves down the middle of the sides to ride on central runners, fixed rails set into the carcase that the drawer rides on, was popular centuries ago and was showing signs of returning to fashion. More often, the runners sit under the sides in housings, shallow slots cut to hold them, though that housing must be left unglued; at the back, the runners are instead fixed with open slot screwing, screws driven through an elongated slot rather than a plain hole. In solid carcase work, a stub tenon, a short tenon that does not run the full width of the joint, is formed on each runner and glued where it fits into a groove cut in the front rail. Fibre drawer slides, made from a tough fibre composite, are another option: one piece is screwed onto the drawer, its mate mounted inside the carcase. A drawer back can instead be jointed into the sides with a full-thickness housing, though this works well only if that housing fits really tightly; it is planed to width and thickness with its top edge rounded over. A drawer that comes out of true, not square, can be corrected by trimming its bottom to pull it back square.

Marking and cutting the joints

Before cutting, a drawer front's inside face is planed true and checked for twist as the work goes on, and the bottom edge is planed straight; assuming the opening it must fit is rectangular, one end is then cut square. A chevron mark scratched on the outside of the front stock keeps track of which edge is meant to stay uppermost through all this handling. A marking gauge, set a touch narrower than the actual thickness of the drawer sides to leave room for the width the cutter itself removes, is run along the inside face of the front and all the way round the back piece. The dovetail pins for the front and back are then laid out and stepped off with a joiner's bevel, a tool for transferring an angle from one place to another, and the layout marks are carried down square to meet the gauge line. Once the tails are sawn and pared clean, the face piece can be clamped in a vice with the tail board rested against it, letting the pins be marked directly from the cut tails. On a middle drawer in a run of several, these dovetail slots need careful positioning as they are cut, since they are hard to adjust for fit once the drawer is assembled. On a bow-front drawer, one with a curved face, the dovetails must be angled square to the chord of the arc, the straight line joining the two ends of the curve, rather than to the curved face surface itself; once the curves are cut, two flats can then be planed parallel to that chord.

Assembly and fitting

Each drawer is fitted individually to its cabinet. Once cut, it is dovetailed together and the back fixed into place; the inside is cleaned up before the dovetails are glued, and once the fit is satisfactory, the parts are glued together and sanded thoroughly. Hasluck (1897) recommended cutting away the drawer's upper face in the centre as a grip, instead of fitting a handle, 'which would catch in the workman's clothes.' Where a drawer stop is fitted this way, it must sit somewhere other than at the front, because the front joint is not strong enough to take it. As Jones (1920) put it, once the lock is fixed with screws and the key runs smoothly in the escutcheon, the metal plate that lines the keyhole, and the lock, one should 'place the drawer in the job and push it home.' One project shows the scale these choices work at in practice: solid-oak faces sized to leave roughly a 1/16 inch gap all round the opening, a single piece of stock crosscut into three fronts sized to the cabinet, sides, fronts and backs cut from half-inch plywood to the plan's own sizes, and holders glued onto the drawer bottoms.