Cabinets, Drawers and catches
for my bus
Time to do the kitchen cabinets!!
I went to a university surplus yard and found a couple pallets of nice birch office cabinets with drawers that were actually made of quality solid wood laminate rather than the particle board junk. They also had very nice ball bearing sliders and stainless steel hinge hardware. I bought the whole mess for $100, brought a vanload home and took it all apart. Took some of the drawer sets and cut them in half, stacked parts and pieces on top of each other, sawed doors, hacked drawers and sanded my brains out, and ended up with a very custom cabinet set in my kitchen and clothes closet that is beautiful, quality, inexpensive, and took me one week from start to finish (well, so far at least).
To top it off I put matching oak faces that I'd bought from a busnut 6 months ago on to all of the kitchen drawers and cabinets , and poof, instant wife pleaser!!
(note, the finishes look like they don't match on some of the cabinets, they do- it's just the way they respond to my flash I guess)
Still a bit of work to go, but for now it's very functional and no more living out of BINS (Ugh!!)
My propane forced-air heater can be seen snuggled down there under the drawers... one of it's outlets is hosed out thru the face of the cabinet door next to it, and aims into the kitchen and mid-bus. The other silver outlet hose can be seen heading towards the bedroom in the rear of the bus. The bus is insulated well enough that only those two heater outlets are sufficient to warm the whole bus up nicely. The door's hose (you can't see it in the photos) is long enough that I can open the door easily. That one's not actually an official cabinet door so much as it is an access panel... inside are two gas shutoff valves and the backside of the hot water heater, with just enough storage room left for the bottles of pottie enzymes and a pair of gloves, etc. Next week I'll make a facing for the heater out of perforated metal so it will look nice but air can still get in to the intake.
So far so good....
***BUT***
Ball bearing slides are real nice until you park just a bit out of level and then ugh... everything opens on it's own. Bunji cords were my first thought but the wife nixed that idea as soon as it was formed... so what to do?
Originally I thought I'd go on the bus board and ask everyone about what the cool latches were that they used in their conversions, thinking I'd just buy a bunch of them and install 'em, and be done with it. So I asked and a few of you generously told me about Rockler catches and also Hafele hardware.
I went to the ROCKLER site and found the recommended catch:
I thought these were nice although a bit pricey at $12.99 each... my entire set of drawers and cabinets only cost me $100 and it was difficult to justify more than twice that for just the silly catches, but I couldn't figure anything else out so I decided to purchase a bunch of them.
The first thing I noticed was that I had to set up an account with Rockler. Fine, I did so even though they wanted a bit more "personal" info than I though necessary. Oh well, goes with the territory.. Then I noticed that even though buying more than 5 pcs got me a 10% discount, it was more than offset by their fee that added $11.99 to any order over $100 for *handling*!!
Besides all of that, even though Rockler is based in Minneapolis, they have storefronts everywhere including California and so they had to nail me for sales tax. In all, the $ total was getting out of hand so quickly that I got cold feet and cancelled the order.
I then went on a twofold internet quest. For one, some of my drawers purposely don't have wooden bars built over the tops of each of them... because my kitchen sink's drain trap and drinking water pump are behind one of the stacks of drawers, I need easy access for servicing. Traditional drawer construction precludes me just pulling the drawers out and getting behind them. The way I built these drawers, I can pull them all out and I have totally clear access to the entire wall behind (where the goodies are mounted). So even though the Rockler units are neat, I couldn't figure out how to use them - due to the way I built my drawers, there was no place to mount the little catch-part on the cabinet!
I ended up at Austin Hardware & Supply Inc., who sells this neat little "Quarter turn" catch for less than five bucks!.
The catch has an internal ball bearing/spring loaded detent system, so when you turn it, it clicks into position with a nice "feel" and holds itself there.
Ideas were starting to form!!
Again, I resumed my quest for a Rockler substitute for my other more "traditional" cabinetry, and finally found these guys,
the Japanese company "Sugatsune" who makes nice cabinet hardware and especially this:
It's a nice little pushbutton catch set for right around five bucks each! Yup, this is a LOT more in my range of reasonable pricing!! Comes in brown or white... not a designers dream but for the price I can put up with the color choices!
A couple of days later when all of the various catches and latches came in the mail, with some 1/8" welding rod I transformed the Quarter turn latches into very nice locking mechanisms for my kitchen drawers!
All I had to do was punch a small hole in the end of the catch's tab, and bend up the welding rod just like a carburetor linkage. It works amazingly well and was cheap and simple!! Here's a few photos: (click the photos for larger images) I made it so the rod is actuated by the latch, and when the latch is turned it pokes the end of the rod out of the side of the door and into a hole drilled into the cabinet sidepiece. It works super well, holds the drawer securely, and was simple to make.
The quarter turn latch from Austin:
My kitchen drawers with catches installed-
The top one is a hinged door that accesses a little shelf
that I built under the sink where the wifie stores her towels and gloves.
Below that are four drawers...
A drawer showing the rod I made sticking out of the side of it-
if the drawer were shut, turning the knob would result in the end of the rod poking into the cabinet's side woodwork
thus securely locking the shut drawer to the cabinet's side.
A closeup of the locking end of the rod, extended:
And a closeup of the lock in the opened and closed position,
and how i bent the welding rod and attached it to the catch tab:
Oh Yeah...The Sugastune catches!
They are very nice, and easy to install... once they're installed you just shut the door or drawer and they lock automatically with a nice feeling "click".
A gentle push on the button opens them, and they hold during driving just fine. Here's a couple closeups:
Oh yeah... don't make the mistake I made with my tool drawer... it is on such nice bearing slides, and I completely did not "get" that if I were in my driver's cabin area with the door closed, AND forgot to latch the drawer prior to driving off, that I'd be the first to see how difficult it is to crawl out of the driver's window!! It had my wife laughing so hard it just about hurt her!!! A simple Eyebolt screwed into the door fixed the problem...
