Not long after building my workbench, I realized how useful it would be to have drawers in it. Not only that, but when planing boards, it had a tendency to jump around quite bit, and I wanted to add some weight to it.

I bought some playground sand from a local hardware store, added a plywood bottom to the bench and filled up some job site garbage bags full of sand to rest on the recently-added bottom. I closed it in with another piece of plywood that would serve as the base for the cabinet carcass.

I added sides, a center divider, a back, and a top. The bench was not designed with this application in mind, so it took a little creative thinking to get it figured out. I bought 100-pound full-extension drawer slides, since I figured these would take quite a bit of abuse over the years. With them in hand, I could use their thickness to figure out just how wide my drawers had to be.

The drawers are simple in construction. They use lock-rabbet drawer joints for strength, and the bottom is similarly locked in.

The drawer slides on the sides are screwed in, but since the center ones compete for real estate with each other, I just put bolts through one, the center divider, and then the other.

With the drawers in place, I could cut up the single panel for the front, and and then all of the drawer fronts out of it. This made it so that the grain matches across the whole front.

The handles are just cut from pine 2x4’s, first cutting a rabbet out of one corner, then a miter to give the top a nice slope, and then two more miters to taper the handle from back to front.