Drawer locks

[Stuart Douglas]

Is there a convenient way to set the drawerbox behind a drawerfront a set distance from the top edge of the front, rather than the bottom? When I place a drawer in a cabinet, with the parameters for bottom and top inset, it seems to be always referenced off the bottom of the drawerbox. That is if I set those parameters with some "slop" between the actual space and the insets required it places the drawer biased towards the bottom of the opening. presumably to maximize the drawer height.

What I'd like to do is specify a top inset so that every cabinet drawerfront exposes the same amount above the drawerbox, to make adding locks to these drawers after the fact more straight forward. It seems no matter how many times I address this with clients before fabrication, there is always an after the fact conversation " can we just add a lock to that?" It would be helpful therefore to index this setting to only the top of the drawer so fitting stretchers onsite for the catch is standardized.

[Carmen Addamo]

Stuart would it work to just use a top inset and then lock the drawer box height to (X)

[Stuart Douglas]

It doesn't seem to work that way, there needs to be some numerical value in the bottom inset variable box, and that value seems to drive the relative "Y" positioning. It is rather cumbersome to do the back-figuring to find the correct value for the top inset, based on the other values (drawer height, insets, etc) AND its all blown out of the water if you try to change material thicknesses, for example in the adj features or global change options.

I'm not sure there is even a cumbersome, back-figuring, way to do this, since the reference face always seems to be the bottom of the drawer.

IDEALLY I'd like to place drawer heads, with its drawer box, so that the reveal between the top edge of the drawer box and the bottom edge of the cabinet member above it are a user fixed value.

On a tall file drawer, we've bypassed this problem by dropping the top edge of the front of the drawerbox by an inch, to prevent the lock hole from being near the edge of that component, but on shorter drawers, doing so would prevent those components from being edgebanded by our machine- they would be too narrow.