Narrowing 53 year old spice drawers.

[dbhost]

So one of my shop organization projects is to install one of the wide spice drawers my sister in law gave me that was torn out of her kitchen when they mucked out after the Harvey flood. There was a cracked side due to mishandling of the drawer, but that has been fixed VERY solidly, and now the dilema. The drawer, 3/4" ply braces for the rails to slide on, and rails would end up being 6" too wide for mounting under the wide table in my BT3100.

These drawers for bing a half century old are made with decent oak wood, and the dadoes are cut nice and clean to recieve the bottoms, but the joinery is simple butt joints, glue and nails. The drawer fronts are what looks like router carved although I am not sure that was a thing in 1969 when the house / cabinets were built. And there is easily 5 coats of paint on the drawer front. The bottom layer of which MAY contain lead paint due to its age.

I would like to repurpose these drawers just for family consistency, BUT I for the life of me cannot see any good way to rebuild these drawers without basically tearing them down, reclaiming the wood, and potentially just, well, building new drawers out of old wood.

I would be a LOT more sympathetic toward them if they had some reasonable joinery that was just suffering glue failure, but just glue and nails? Bleh..

Anyway, that is what / where my thoughts are for next shop project as the finishing touches are VERY close to done for the current project, subject of another thread...

Maybe I should just move on to the lathe cabinet next instead...

[LCHIEN]

You pose these questions but there is so much Missing info:
How many?
How wide are they now, we know they are 6" too wide for what you originally wanted.
How deep and how tall are they?
Picture? Would go a long way to describing the joints and construction and drawer front and hardware.

[capncarl]

I agree with Lchien, not enough info. Maybe you just remove 1 drawer and everything will fit. Reusing family items will mean more to you, don’t worry about the lead paint, just leave it be.

[dbhost]

How many. One. Just one of the extra wide spice drawers.

Dimensions pending, Mostly because it is late in the evening and I still haven't had dinner, and work starts at 6:00 A.M. all over again.

[capncarl]

Pick out the most buggered up side and cut everything off on that side and rebuild it as such.

[dbhost]

The drawer was 36" x 6" x 18".

The drawer is now 30" x 6" x 18".

It's a funny drawer as it ramps down at the front. The drawer front is literally a 1.5 x 1" piece of pine. Yeah it's funky, and old.

But I have the dimensions I needand tomorrow I might just be able to get the drops for the slides sized up, and mounted to the underside of the extension table, get the slides installed on them and install the drawer.