My pantry drawer fronts are all installed now! In order to install them, I had to drill all the holes for my hardware. To do that, I had to make a custom drawer pull template. I ordered cup hinge drawer pulls which are wider than average so the drawer pull template I have (and the ones commonly sold and readily available) didn’t work. Short of waiting around for a special order, I had to make my own.
I attempted first to make one out of 1/4″ mdf.
However, no matter how carefully I measured and marked, I could not get the screws in exactly the right place. I traced, and measured and eyeballed and drilled.
And still could not get the two screws to line up PERFECTLY so they would both screw into the pull through the template at the same time. They could take turns. But they wouldn’t share the template!
If only I could see THROUGH the template I could mark the exact location of the holes and they wouldn’t be able to “punk me” and jump around and change every time I turned my back.
I was about to run purchase a small piece of plexiglass when I remembered that I saved the scrap from my Dust Collection Modification experiment (7 long days last summer). Sometimes my inability to throw ANYTHING away is a good thing!
I was originally thinking I’d secure the plexiglass to a rail that would sit on top of the drawer but decided that wouldn’t work because I’m installing the drawer pulls inside the recessed panel so I just cut a square-ish piece of plexiglass that I would use kind of freehand.
The holes in the pull are 1/2″ lower than the center of the pull. So I need to drill my holes 1/2″ lower on the drawers than where I want the center of the pull to end up.
Making sure I had the correct width, I marked a hole location every 1/2″.
Then I went to my drill press and drilled all the holes.
AND son of a gun if I didn’t get the better of those holes in the end!
Once I drilled all the holes, I moved on to prep and painting the cabinet doors.
