Easy Drawer Hardware Layout!

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. You know, one of the things that can really be troubling is when you're trying to lay out hardware on drawer fronts and it can be a lot of fiddling. Well, I found a tip online that really works and I'd like to pass it on to you. Stay tuned. Well, if you've ever had to lay out several drawer fronts, you know it can be a little bit troubling and a lot of fiddling around. Well, there's a little tip that I saw that I tried out and it really does work. And you can use it to do one-off layouts or if you had several drawer fronts of the same size, you could actually make a jig, which I'll show you in a few minutes, or a template to do this. But here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna use a little bit of diagonals on this to put placements and center the hardware right dead center, top and bottom, and left to right on this drawer front. Now, the first thing you've got to know is just the distance between the screw holes in the hardware. So let's say in this case, you've got a four-inch pole and you're going to place it right in the center and equidistant on each side. So the first thing you're gonna do is you just need a ruler. You're going to measure the distance of the center to center pole screw attachment holes. And in this case, it's four inches. So I'm gonna go four inches down this way and I'm gonna go down to the other end and put four inches there as well. And then I'm gonna use my square and just transfer that mark across to both sides. So I'm gonna put a little mark here, one here. Let's flip the square. We'll go to the opposite side and we'll do the same thing right here and here. All right, now that you have these four marks, which is exactly the distance of center to center for the mounting screws for your hardware, you're simply gonna connect the appropriate diagonals. So in this case, we'll start at this outside corner. We'll go to there and we're gonna put a mark where we know it's gonna land about in the center. Then I'm gonna move to my right, to your left and do the same thing again and put another mark there. Now we're gonna reverse order. I'm gonna take this one and run it from the corner to the mark, do a cross right there, move my left to your right, do the same thing again. And there, you have your two center marks right there. They're centered left and right or top to bottom, however you wanna call it out and also along the length of the drawer front. Now let's just test our deal here. We said four inches. Is that four inches? Well, it sure is. It falls right there. And if we look and go left or right, this happens to be about five and an eighth or five and just shy of an eighth. Well, so it's two and a half inches, what I call strong. So you can see it works really well. Now, I'll usually take some kind of a punch and do a starter hole so that the bit doesn't drift a bit off of a center here, but this can get a little borious if you're doing it over and over again. So then one of the tricks that I do is I create a little jig. This is not a jig for this. This is for another pattern that I use ongoing, but you would simply do a couple of little fences. This is a two-sided, so it works either way. And then you would make it big enough that you could lock it onto the corner and pre-drill holes in this position. So you can do this over and over again. Another thing we do is we make these by using a Bix bit like this or a self-centering bit that works like this that fits right in here. So if this was the placement, this would simply drill right in here. I could just do a real quick touch to start the pilot hole and it makes it really easy to get this right without a lot of fiddling around. Well, if you found the tip to be helpful, won't you like it? And better yet, subscribe to our channel. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com.