Making routed panels for drawer cabinets without a router!

I wanted to do a quick post about making panels with rebates in them without using a router. You still need at least a circular saw, but if you don't have a router you can make these panels using two layers of material. 

I chose 9mm and 6mm MDF because I had some in the workshop. 12 and 6 or two pieces of 9mm would give you an 18mm thick panel which would be the standard thickness I use to build cabinets.

I cut my base layer (9mm board) to the height of the finished panel (800mm) and to the width of two panels plus a bit of waste (1200mm). The 6mm sheet was cut into 1200mm by 74mm strips. I've posted before about how I used a saw board with a circular saw to make treatable cuts.

You need to make some spacers for assembly and I made mine 14mm wide. Just cut one piece long enough to split into three. Oh and I cut a 20mm wide strip to go on the bottom of the panel as a starting point. This also allows me to use an 18mm thick base or stretcher at the bottom and it leaves a 2mm gap to the bottom runner.

It was then a matter of using the spacers to position the 6mm strip, check it for square and glue and pin it in position. Move the spacers and repeat all the way up. Before you start pinning, mark up where you are going to cut the assembled panel into two pieces. I did this on the first 6mm board. This is where you don't want to put any pins! Saw blades don't like nails or screws.

Once the glue is dry you can cut the panels to width and make your cabinet.

So why 74mm? It just so happens that the cabinets I make to go under the benches work on an 88mm spacing so 74mm with a 14mm gap gives me 88mm. Of course it doesn't work with the 800mm panels, but they were made to fit into a different bench. 

If you don't want to use that much 6mm board, you could rip it to say 20mm wide and then use a wider spacer to position it. The starting point is to work out the internal height of the cabinet and then work out how many drawers you can fit in the space. I make my drawers from 12mm material, so I use a runner width of 14mm. 

Say I was building a cabinet with internal dimensions of 722mm, and I want to have space for 6 single height drawers in it. I subtract 2mm for the clearance at the bottom of the cabinet and divide 720 by 6. The gives me 120mm for each drawer space. A 14mm space for the runner leaves 106mm for the drawer. Then it's just a matter of cutting the runners and spacer to watch those measurements. Depending on how you make the drawer, you need to leave 2mm at the top so it doesn't bind on the drawer above.

These are trays rather than drawers but the principle is the same. It's basically a box with a base that runs in the slots in the side panel. Because these slots are made with a router they're a bit deeper than 6mm, but only by a 1-2mm. By sheer chance that meant the the sides of the drawers were 9mm in from the edge, so I cut a couple of 9mm spaces so I could position the sides in from the edge and then squaring it up to the front and back, I glued and pinned the base in place. 

I might take some better photos of a drawer and see if I can explain it better, but it's essentially the same process that I used in an earlier post but without the rebates to square it all up.