My wife has never been happy with the trays in the drawers in which we keep our cutlery (and other eating implements) because the preformed trays never have spaces quite the right size or the entire tray is the wrong size for the drawer and so on. I can’t deny that it is a bit messy and often means that things have to be mixed together when you’d prefer they were separate.
So, after a good deal of messing about with CAD (cardboard-aided design) I came up with something I thought would work and planed down some scraps of cedar to a suitable size to make dividers. After longer than I expected, I came up with this.
It’s snug in the drawer so makes as much space as possible available and the compartments are all sized to fit the implements they contain, so I’m quite pleased.
The only thing that really lets this one down is the joints. The idea of chiselling or routing out the rebates for the joins filled me with horror at the time it would take, so I slightly cheated and used the “trench cutting” feature of my chop saw, which stops the blade descending all the way through a workpiece. It took a little time to get the depth correct, but from then on it worked pretty well. What I didn’t really internalise was that the teeth on the blade are not flat-topped, so the bottom of the cut is not flat and there’s an obvious gap in some joints as a result.
The cutlery drawer was relatively easy from a design point of view as most of the compartments contain a single type of item and the sizing is therefore simple. Having done one drawer however there were then requests to do another, which also had a poorly-fitting pre-formed tray (in fact one tray plus half of another). In this case the drawer is used for all sorts of random cooking implements, so getting the right sizes for compartments was somewhat more tricky and it took me some time to work up to a solution. I’m not sure it’s perfect, but I won’t be making another as I’ve run out of cedar 😀 Nonetheless, I’m fairly pleased with how it has worked out.
