This is a chest of drawers for my shop, and a design I'd been working on for a while. It's intended to be CNC machined from full sheets of plywood, and it's fully parametric: I just type in drawer heights and quantities, and it generates a program for producing both the case and the drawers, ready to glue and nail together.
The design (October 2025)
Drawers are mounted with standard drawer slides, and the CNC setup drills the screw holes for attaching them in both the drawer sides and the case sides, to make installation simple. The extra space below the lowest drawer is so I can fill it with concrete or something to keep the center of gravity low, and to provide stability if I park something heavy on top.
The drawer construction is nonstandard, but I've used something similar for years now without any trouble. Normally you'd make a box with a separate front rather than rabbeting the sides into the front, and the bottom would sit in a groove rather than just being attached flush. But I'm optimizing for CNC construction, and glue is pretty damn strong. I used to use pocket screws for attaching drawer sides to ends, and I might still, but I'm going to see if glue and nails will work. These don't need to be super heavy-duty, and it's hard to beat the strength-to-time ratio of glue and a pneumatic nailer.
Cutting the parts (November 2025)
Full sheet CNC router for the win: the cabinet parts are cut. On November 3 I was about to find out whether it would go together correctly and as easily as I was hoping.
Assembly (November 2025)
By November 15 the first iteration was nearly complete.
An assembly fixture helped a lot. It's a sheet of OSB on sawhorses with small wood blocks screwed down at intervals to locate the parts.
This might be the first time I've put drawers into something within a few months of assembling the case.
There were issues galore, mostly tolerancing, which is typical for a CNC project. But I think they're all addressable, and the end result is completely usable.
Putting things away (November 2025)
The next day: now to actually put things away. Here's one of the drawers with a 3D-printed organizer in it.
