Installing drawer and cabinet hardware

[Rmarsh]

I installed another kitchen this week and since this subject came up I took a few pictures of my hardware hole marking jig for drawer fronts.
The door drilling jigs are simple enough to make and Ive posted pics of them before....drawers are much different.
For a while now the door and drawer fronts we use at our customers request have been shaker style or "inset panel". This made drawer drilling even easier for me with this jig. I make my living doing this so it has to be accurate and fast.... here's how......i hope I can explain it.
I measure the vertical height of just the inset panel for top drawers.
then I take a small piece of the 1/4" thick toe kick material...can be any 1/4" stuff.... and rip it to half the height of the inset. I look for the widest drawers to do first and cut that piece to the length of the inset panel.
I then take that strip and find dead center and mark it as the CL.."center line". Next I take the actual door pull and measure the distance between holes and divide it exactly in half.....and mark my jig strip to match. Then I lay the strip against the inset panel and use an awl to push into the panel at those marks. The awl is better than using pencil marks and makes a tiny indent that is perfect for starting a brad point drill. Then go to the next smaller in width drawer....cut the strip to that width....keeping the CL in the center of the strip.

Sometimes I do a shorter version of the strip.....just longer than the pull and mark the center of the panel and apply the jig to it. I do the same for lower drawers which are wider. This method has saved me a ton of time and is super accurate.