The Shop Table - Shims For Slides

Now it's time to add some detail to the inside. Because the face frame is wider than the panels (1-1/4" versus 3/4"), the drawer slides cannot be attached directly to the panels. You can purchase kits that allow you to attach the drawer slide to the face frame and a bracket which is mounted to the back panel. But why buy those when you can simply install a shim. Since the face frame material is centered on the panels, the face frame with overhang 1/4" on each side. To allow for clearance, we could use a 3/8" shim, however, there's another design consideration: the doors. I'll be using europeon style hinges that are mounted to the edge of the face frame. When the door is open, the inside edge of the door protrudes into the face frame opening about 3/8". So now what we actually need is a shim that is 5/8" minimum. We'll use a piece of 3/4" plywood to give us about 1/8" clearance from the drawer slide to the door. This only applies to the hinge side, but to make things easier, we're going to use the 3/4" thoughout.

Here are the shims that I cut last night. I've pre-drilled them for the screws. The holes are located to miss the mounting holes for the drawer slides. Also, you'll notice that there are two different sets of shims. They differ because the holes on one set are slightly offset from the holes on the other set. This is to prevent any in-wood screw collisions.

The shims for the bottom drawer slides will be 3/4" up from the bottom and the top drawer slides will be 1-3/4" down from the cleats. To make it easier to position the shims, I cut a spacer to 1-3/4" wide from a scrap piece of 3/4" plywood.

Laying the spacer flat properly positions the shim. I put a clamp on the front end to hold the shim in place while I pre-drilled the very hard white ash using the holes in the shim as a guide.




After the screws are installed, the spacer is removed and we move on to the rest of the bottom shims.





After the bottom shims are installed, we turn our attention to the top shims. You can see the spacer in place, turned to the veritcal position, against the top cleats. Once again, I pre-drilled and installed the screws.

The clamps and spacer are removed to be used on the remaining top shims.

This pretty much completes the woodworking for the cascass. The next step will be to add the face frame, which I will probably start tomorrow.