Hardware for Making Your Own Drawer Handles

The Term “Hardware”

• The term “hardware” is often colloquially misapplied to mean only nails, screws and metal fittings. In fact, it can refer to items made from wood, glass, porcelain and ceramics, even plastic. Any object that forms part of a drawer rehabilitation project that does not comprise the drawer itself -- meaning the front, side, back and base panels -- is hardware.

Home Made Drawer Handles

• Drawer handles must be hard-wearing and functional, but they can be more than utilitarian. Thought of as a flourish -- a finishing touch -- instead of a device in place simply to pull on, home-made handles can reflect your tastes or work as accents that match the rest of the room’s decor. They can be made to suit anything from the style of a restored historical home to a child’s favorite interest in a playroom.

How Handles are Held In Place

• Drawer handles are typically held onto drawer fronts in one of two ways. They can use screws driven into the drawer front from the outside through a handle baseplate, but more commonly they use a set screw fed from the inside through a predrilled hole; the set screw is driven into a receiver with a matching thread inside the handle’s stem. Necessary hardware, then, is a handle with either a baseplate or a threaded internal receiver, and the fasteners used to hold the baseplate or stem in place. Typically the baseplate method uses round-headed screws, and the set screw method uses countersunk screws.

Reusing Old Handles

• Preexisting handles are usually held in place by all the hardware necessary. Reusing the handles and making them your own through ornamentation also allows the reuse of the hardware, saving both time and money.

Type of Drawer Front

• The type of drawer front has an effect on what hardware you can and cannot use. If using the baseplate method, the drawer front must be thick and strong enough to accommodate the screws. In the set screw method, the length of the set screw is determined by the thickness of the drawer-front material; the threaded receiver inside the handle only allows for a certain amount of error. For instance, the combination of a handle receiver that is half an inch deep and a drawer front that is half an inch thick requires the use of a three-quarter inch set screw; half an inch to pass through the drawer front and a quarter inch to thread into the receiver.

Invisible Hardware

• Some manufacturers produce “invisible” hardware that allows for drawer operation without a functional pull handle being necessary; sprung catches open the drawer after a specific point on the drawer front has been pressed and released. Invisible hardware allows for even more freedom in making drawer handles. No longer constrained to use handle hardware that is functional, the handles can be made of purely decorative or extremely delicate materials.