I wanted to maximise the storage on my IVAR, so I’ve started to make some more drawers. As before I wanted to be able to move these around, or completely reconfigure my set up later if needed, so they are made so as to not be permanently fixed.
There’s no handle on the drawer yet, but it shows how it can be pulled out to the full depth. These brackets are pretty sturdy, so I don’t envisage any issues with the weight of the drawer contents.
Making the Brackets
The holes for the pegs in the legs are 1 1/4″ apart, so I firstly made 2 pairs of brackets. This was some angle aluminium I had lying about. The two sides were approx 15mm and 20mm.
The larger holes are 6.5mm diameter (and 1 1/4″ apart) on the shorter side, and the smaller ones 4mm dia on the 20mm side. The spacing of these is not so critical on these holes.
Fixing the Drawer Slides
Next, I cut 2 pieces of 18mm ply, 500mm x 65mm for the brackets to fix onto. The runners will in turn, fix onto these. The runners were from Amazon and 500mm long (soft close) – as I wanted the drawers to be able to extend their full depth.
The Drawer
The drawer was made to be 100mm deep, only as this seemed like a reasonable size. The 3 sides of the drawer (2 sides and the front were routed with a slot to accommodate the bottom, which was 5mm ply (or hardboard) – you could of course, just nail or screw the bottom on if you don’t have access to a router.
Further Thoughts & Ideas
The one thing I though about while making these was that I wasn’t making full use of the width, as the 2 side pieces were 18mm each, meaning that the drawer was 36mm narrower than it could have been. An alternative construction would be to just use aluminium for the side pieces, and mount the runners on that.. That way the drawer could be about 30mm (3cm) wider.
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