OK…i’m ready to build my first cabinet…first of many i hope.
Drawers. I was planning on using Poplar (5/8 is what i’m planning). What’s the best/most economical way to get this? Seems like most material is 4/4 but that seems to be a waste. Should i buy something thicker and resawing it on the bandsaw so that it’s closer to 5/8s?
Replies
Depending on the quality of the poplar, you may have difficulty doing that. I don't think you could easily use 6/4 to resaw- if the wood had any bow or twist in it. I suppose you could rough cut it to size, resaw it and then mill it, but you'd need to pick the wood carefully- and it might not work. You might have to go with 8/4-which is a lot of work for no savings.
Since poplar is still fairly inexpensive (at least where I live)- I'd probably buy 4/4 and mill it. Normally 4/4 will mill to 3/4- which means you're only wasting 1/8.
If you are making a drawer (and might be cutting dovetails, perhaps by hand, something that poplar is fairly good for) think of your time and effort and the fairly tight tolerances. If you scrimp on the milling (which I would do in two sittings, 4-5 days apart and sticker in between) and your drawer ultimately warps, you're not going to be a happy camper. Wood isn't cheap, but neither is your time (which is also not replaceable).
I might resaw wood in this setting, but only if it were rare or expensive or I wanted matching panels (e.g. tiger maple). In that case I would try for 5/4 or 6/4 and go down to 1/2- except for half-dovetails on the drawer front which would be ~5/8.
Glaucon
Bob,
5/8 makes for a pretty hefty drawer side. We don't know the size of your drawers, so perhpas 5/8 is proper, but you might get a better look with thinner. I typically go with 5/4 stock, thicknessed, resawn, stickered, remilled, and net about 7/16 or 3/8, which is good for all but the heaviest of drawers.
Alan
http://www.alanturnerfurnituremaker.com
You may need to expand your choice of suppliers. Do you have a planer? 1/2" is common for drawer sides, you can buy 1/2" in many places but it's nice to be able to mill it yourself, to ensure that it is straight and flat. Drawer side thickness is not as important as the bottoms and the way they are supported. 5/8" is a tad heavy. When planing down a board it is best to take equal amounts off both sides. If you saw 1/8" off one side, it is more likely to warp. There are many other materials you could use, Baltic birch is popular for it's stability but not so good for hand cut dovetails. Sometimes making choices on economy can lead to trouble that isn't worth the small savings. I'd check out your Yellow pages for hardwood suppliers and see if they have something nice in stock or will mill some at a reasonable price. I imagine a large city like Columbia will have quite a few choices. HD here carries 1/2" pine and poplar, sometimes you can find some acceptable pieces.
Beat it to fit / Paint it to match
Bob, I don't see what the problem is here, purchase 3/4" S2S poplar and plane it to 5/8", personally I like thicker drawer sides. If your going to let the drawers slide on wooden runners the extra thickness wears less than thinner sides. But I'd go with a harder wood in such a case such as Maple or Oak, if your using metal slides softer woods work fine. buck
Sycamore is a very common traditional drawer side material. It wears well and slides easily.
Poplar doesn't wear very well, so if the drawers are sliding on the bottom of the sides, you'll want to attach slips to the sides underneath the drawer bottoms to provide better wear. Not a bad idea no matter what wood you are using.
If you are using metal drawer slides, poplar should work fine, but I prefer a thinner side myself, around 3/8 or 7/16. I've got a couple of pieces in my house that are over 150 years old, with drawer sides in that range. They are still holding up fine. (one's from around 1740)
Michael R.
I too would urge you to start with the straightest 4/4 stock you can find, and then plane roughly equal amounts from both sides to arrive at your desired thickness.
Resawing from thicker stock opens up a range of potential problems, and is more work.
Poplar is not a good choice for drawers: poor stability and wear are the key limitations. Then again, that's just the advice of Tage Frid...
Buy 6/4, 8/4 or thicker maple and resaw drawer stock from that; just be sure to cut it thick (up to 1/8" extra) and leave it for 2+ weeks to re-equilibrate. Do your final milling right before you make the drawers. If using curly maple, be sure to spray the wood with water before running it through the jointer or planar, and take no more than 1/32" off at a pass to avoid (or at least reduce) tear out.
Poplar's not so bad. True, it's not super hard, but about 90% of the old Victorian Wanut case pieces I've worked on had poplar drawer sides, along with the lion's share of the other 19th Century furniture. If you use slips, they hold up pretty well. Actually, that could be a good thing. It's a lot easier to repair a drawer side than it is to repair grooves in the rails in the carcase.
As for stability, poplar is actually more stable than hard maple, and about the same as most of the soft maples. Tangential green to dry shrinkage of poplar runs abbout 8.2%, where sugar (hard) maple runs 9.9%, about 20% more.
My first choice is still sycamore, then oak, but I think I'd use poplar before hard maple, and about as soon as soft maple.
Michael R
Thanks so much for all the feedback. Yes i do have a planer and i appreciate the feedback on proper use -- i hadn't really considered the importance of taking equal amounts off of both sides (sometimes i'm amazed how much i have to learn). ;)
And i assumed that poplar was the default.
Based on this feedback, i'll may make these first drawer sides out of 1/2 oak. I guess i'll look at what it costs to make a call on buying something like 6/4 and resawing it vs. buying s2s 1/2 or 5/8 and milling it down some.
I'm planning on using decent metal drawer guides and using a dovetail jig (Porter Cable's version) for the joinery.
Poplar unstable?? hmmmm.........where'd you pick that up? Frid may have had other reasons for advising against Poplar for drawers, but I doubt if stability was one of them.
It's often tempting to take thicker material like 1-1/2" stuff and deep rip the thickness into two equal halves yielding about 1/2" - 5/8" stuff and it's perfectly doable given one or two safeguards.
Wood out of the kiln (therefore retailer) can suffer from a variety of faults including case hardening and reverse case hardening meaning the outer core and inner shell are fighting each other.
It's not always easy to tell if either of these serious faults are present when you just look at a board, or even at the point when you start to machine the stuff. It's sometimes only as you go on and start deep ripping and the wood pinches on the blade or springs open that you discover the case hardening fault.
This I suspect has led to the often expounded advice of planing equal amounts from both faces and edges. It should in theory keep any imbalance in stress equalised, and the plank reasonably straight making case hardened wood usable. I use the trick myself and I find it does help.
But deep ripping, and even ripping a wide plank to narrower widths can reveal case hardening type stresses because the stresses are put out of balance.
It's always worthwhile doing the fork or prong test on a batch of wood whatever your final intended purpose, but it can help even more if you plan to resaw/deep rip because it will reveal the case hardening faults prior to actually proceeding and perhaps getting yourself into a fine mess.
About 18" or more in from the end of a plank cut a short length out across the width perhaps 1-1/2" -- 2" long. Lay the end grain of this short length on the table of the bandsaw and cut out the centre of the wood leaving a forked piece with the forks about 3/8" or so thick, and the base of the fork about an inch thick. Two prongs are common, and three or four often used on thicker stuff.
If the forks remain parallel you're pretty safe to deep rip. If not the wood is case hardened in one form or another. The forks can pinch together or spread apart. I'll let you guys work out which problem is demonstrated by which end result, ha, ha.
Still, this test is best only if you can be sure that all the wood you've bought and need in a project came from one kilning batch. If the wood comes from different sources and different kilning batches some may be faulty and some just fine, but all the same the fork test can save a lot of aggravation. Slainte.RJFurniture
My mistake, instability was not a problem listed with Poplar. I'd been doing a lot of reading lately on drawers and got some information severely confused. But the warning against poplar in drawers was remembered correctly--but it was due to poplar not standing up to hard wear and tear. I wouldn't use poplar for that reason, but also most poplar I get has a lot of green and brown streaking in it, so it isn't all that attractive, either.
I guess this is a good reason to work from experience and not rely on what you (thought you) read, as experience tends to be clearer in getting its lessons across!
Paul,
Most of the drawers I make use either poplar or soft maple and I have expereince no problems with either. Regarding the greens in poplar, I "sun tan" the wood for a few days and the green becomes a fairly faint light brown, not at all unpleasing. If I need consistant coloring, I use a trans tint dye.
Doug
Sun? What's that? I'm here in New Jersey, and all we've had for the past forever is either monsoons or blizzards.
Thanks for the input, maybe sometime I'll give poplar a try. My most recent stuff has used curly maple for the drawer sides for added elegance, but at some point I'll build something where I can try poplar. It is cheap and mills easily, but that sun-tanning part, I don't know if I can duplicate it.
<was due to poplar not standing up to hard wear and tear>
I guess that could be a concern- but... it depends. I have some old (>100 y) Shaker pieces where the secondary wood in the drawers are pine. I have a hand made hutch, perhaps 90 years old that has Honduran mahogany for all drawer parts. I assume that at the time it was made, mahogany was inexpensive and easy to hand dove tail, so they employed it. But mahogany is one of the "softer" hardwoods.
As for wear, it depends on the use. If I were making a drawer for a computer keyboard, I'd use maple or oak- it would get more than daily use and wear would be significant. But many drawers don't see nearly that much use, and poplar (or pine) is fine. Many early American pieces (>250 y old) used these woods, esp pine. Frank Klausz, no slouch at drawer making uses eastern white pine for his drawers (except for the front). In the drawers that get heavy use, he glues strips of red oak to the bottom. You could probably get the same effect by using hardwood or metal guides if you wanted to. The choice of wood should be dictated by circumstances, and anything from pine to sycamore might be OK.
Poplar is fairly plentiful, fine grained, dovetails nicely and is not too expensive. At the opening of this thread, one of the reasons given to resaw was to save money. I think unless you expect the drawer to see a lot of hard use, poplar would be fine.
Glaucon
OK, OK, OK. I'm not going to defend or attack poplar as a drawer wood. It isn't my first (or second) preference, and I was merely repeating something (i.e., poplar is too soft to be a good choice for drawers) that I read in a FWW article--and we all know you can't rely solely on them.
Not to change the topic too much but what do you typically use for the drawer bottoms?
I'm with you with stability and poplar. I make it a point to keep a good supply on hand at all times and drawers is one of the reasons.
Maybe it makes a difference where it is grown. I cut my own logs and had them milled the last time. Once it has been acclimated to the shop and prepared properly, I have had little problems with stability.
Garryhttp://www.superwoodworks.com
3/4 cherry planed down to 1/2. 1/4 ply bottoms standard with undermount hardware. 1/2 for bigger drawers, and big roll outs.
"Poplar is not a good choice for drawers: poor stability and wear are the key limitations"
Several years ago I made some frame and panel doors for my kitchen cabinets. My first choice was to use poplar since the cabinets were to be painted. After making about 2 or 3 doors I noticed a significant amount of twisting in both the frame members and the paneling. I had to remake the doors using MDF paneling and birch frames. Turned out very nice. I have been reluctant to use poplar ever since.
poor stability and wear are the key limitations
I agree on wear but stabliity I differ on...
Just me though...
Well, I must admit that most discussions I've read or heard about poplar seem to regard it as a good stable secondary wood. I may have just gotten a bad batch.
ANY wood can ACT funny at times.. Wood IS wood!
Sort of like a Human..Good and BAD when you least expect it!
Edited 5/29/2005 2:31 pm ET by Will George
You might want to consider using maple instead of poplar, it's quite a bit more resilient to wear.
OK...i'm ready to build my first cabinet...
You're going to have enough frustration squaring that first carcass, so don't add cranky drawers to the mix! I prefer oak 3/8" for drawers and most large metro areas have at least 1 hardwood supply store. The one we have in Raleigh keeps 3/8" oak in stock and by the time it's sold, it's personality is obvious. Have fun.
Joe
Joe:
You know...you're probably right. It's the typical 'eyes are bigger than his stomach' problem as my dad used to say. I'll take a look around here in Columbia and see what i can find.
Bob,
I will be building new kitchen cabinets w/40 drawers. The kitchen is Maple and I planned to use either hard maple or prefinished 1/2" 9-ply maple plywood. Used the plywood for the prototype in the laundry and it works well but finishing the cut top edge is kinda a pain - easier to just spray the whole durn thing!.
My cabinet-maker friend strongly advised against the maple - moves too much for his liking - and recommended "bleached beech" instead. I'm looking at the supplier's web site JE Higgins Hardwoods) and don't see it listed - I'm guessing that it's Northern Beech that's been treated so it's not so red.
For bottom I used 1/4" prefinished maple ply on the prototype. I will be upgrading to 1/2" for the kitchen since I'm using Blum Tandem (undermount/hidden) glides and they mount into the bottom - the screws would poke through the 1/4".
So, I'll build the drawer case with the back cut to the depth of the dado for the bottom. Spray the box then slide the bottom in and run a couple of screws up into the back. That way I won't get a bunch of blow-back spraying the inside.
Hope that made sense!
Wayne
Wayne, when using Undermount slides from Blum and others there are no screws going up into the drawer bottom. There are screws driven into the back of the drawer front (or the back of the drawer box depending upon the configuration you choose) to locate the locking devices.
There is also a hook at the back of the slide that locates in a hole worked on the back face of the drawer back. The fixing of the locking device and the rear hook on the slide is all that holds the drawer in its position.
Therefore there is no need to use a thicker drawer bottom so that you can screw up into them. You only need to select a thicker drawer bottom if the load dictates it-- which is unlikely unless the drawer is very large and you plan to store something like lead ingots, ha, ha--- ha, ha, ha.
In fact, with Undermount type slides most of the load weight in the drawer is transferred directly through the drawer bottom to the drawer slides under them. The drawer side grooves carry virtually no weight therefore the drawer box structure is under little or no downward load stress except perhaps towards the middle of the drawer front and towards the middle of the drawer back, and these areas can be reinforced by using a drawer mullion. Slainte.RJFurniture
Sgain,
Maybe the Blum's are different in England <grin>. Anyway, mine have 4 screw slots for each mount - 2 that go into the drawer front and 2 that go into the bottom. And, they supply 4 screws for each mount so I'm guessing they expect you to use them. Maybe it's just engineering CYA, cause the ones I have with the 1/4" bottom (just screwed to the front) seem to be working just fine. Any yes, the 1/4" bottom is quite adequate. I have a cabinet-maker friend who prefers the 1/2" because it feels much more subtantial and doesn't cost all that much more - maybe it's a subtle thing his clients like...
Wayne
Ah Wayne. I remembered incorrectly. You're right in that there are a couple of screws that go up through the locking device into the drawer bottom. My apologies on that score.
I was reminded of it yesterday when I went to switch out a couple of pieces at a gallery. I collected one with drawers mounted on Tandem Undermounts and had to pull drawers out to shift the piece, and there they were, screws going up into the 6 mm (1/4") drawer bottom. I pulled out a screw to check-- 1/4" X 6.
That's the solution in my case,and the only reason I suppose to not use a 1/2" thick drawer bottom is the loss of storage space due to reduced internal darawer height. Slainte.RJFurniture
OK now I'm really confused. The Blum install instructions (see http://www.blum.com/usa/img/brochure_pdf/4026_TDM_B.pdf ) show just two screws in each locking device. The drawings don't specify drawer bottom thickness (that I could see). All the examples of the Blum ld have screws into the front of the drawer box. Install specs show them at a 75 degree angle to the front.Slante, where are the screws in the ld?
jhem, the technical details and specs of hardware changes all the time. It may be that in the current Blum locking devices only two screws are used and they go in at about 75° as you describe and as their PDF file indicates.
I'd follow the installation instructions that are supplied with your specific hardware. I've just found out for instance that that group of Blum Tandem Undermounts are available with a soft but positive close, and that the hook that goes into a hole bored into the back of the drawer back is adjustable.
Those are two new features to me, so the next time I specify that brand and type of slide I'll have to take that information on board, and choose to use the features, or not.
It also suggests that an old maxim of mine is still relevant, which is, "Never assume an item is available until you've got it in your hand." Translated, that means don't design and make a piece of furniture with a particular type of hardware in mind unless you've got it and can take measurements from it. Slainte.RJFurniture
RJ GOT IT RIGHT ON THE BUTTON!..
Get all your hardware.. THEN Build!
Wayne -
Thanks. This vanity is essentially my prototype for my upcoming kitchen cabinet. I'm experimenting on the existing house in preperation for the new house. Where are you buying your wood and drawer guides (which model guides are you using).
Bob,
The lumber comes from the local yards: Plywood and Lumber Sales (http://www.pals4wood.com), MacBeath (http://www.macbeath.com) and JE Higgins. The plywood is "Nova" prefinished - sealer + 2 coats clear epoxy IIRC. Very tough finish and no need to finish the boxes - just the doors and drawer fronts.
I'm edge banding the plywood using the Burgess Edge(http://www.burgessedge.com/) Kinda pricy and labor intensive, but you end up with a hardwood edge and that just feels right to me (doubt I'd use it for a commercial job, but that's why we build our own, isn't it?).
I'm using the Blum Tandem 562H 21" glides. For 1/2"-5/8" sides, full extension, 75# load (100# static).
Hope that helps,
Wayne
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