Video Transcript
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[Music] Hey Brian here from The Cabinet Joint. If you've watched our assembly videos in the past, you are probably seeing that we are putting these rear mounting brackets onto the cabinet back before we assemble the cabinet. Um, what happens quite frequently because we're doing so many custom modifications to cabinets these days is we are using the carcass, I'll call it the left and right side top bottom and back from a standardized cabinet like a base fold door, and then we're customizing a front frame for you to go on that cabinet. And what happens is normally with a base cabinet that has drawers, there's little pilot holes that locate wherever these brackets go.
Um, if you're doing a customized box like that, uh, our supplier partner does not pre-drill those pilot holes for you because it's a custom box. They don't know that that frame is going onto, for instance, a base full door box. So what this creates is a little bit of a conundrum for you, the customer, because now you have to manually locate those brackets based on your openings of your custom-configured front frame you worked on with your cabinet coach.
So the point of this video is for us to show you a couple methods. There's two different methods you can use, an easy one and a harder one, but they both work, um, to locate those bracket locations on the cabinet back, transfer those measurements to the cabinet back so you know where to screw those brackets on before you build the box. And then as a third option, let's say you got whacking away cabinets in your garage, you lost track of what you were doing, and you didn't put those brackets on before you assembled. I want to take the assembled cabinet and then show you how to locate the interior and exterior bracket locations based on an assembled box. Very simple to do, but the measurements change a little bit, so I just want to show you a quick workaround on an already assembled box. So let's get going.
Um, right, I have in front of me here is just a short, um, four-drawer opening cabinet we created. That's your back. There's no mounting or no holes right now for these brackets. Bear in mind that if the cabinet coaches you're working with use, for instance, a base, uh, two-drawer, five-door, two-door, five-drawer cabinet as their starting cabinet, when you look, you might have pilot holes. They're just not going to line up with your front frame. So be aware that just because you have pilot holes, if it's a custom-configured box with a custom-configured front frame, those pilot holes may not line up. In my case, I have none, so I'm starting with a clean slate.
Here's the preferred method. Um, we're going to take the camera off the tripod. It's going to get a little jiggly, but I want you to get a closeup of what we're doing here as we proceed. Okay, we're going to get started on method one, which is using the frame as your template. Before I do that, I want to make one brief comment. You'll hear me talk about it when I'm down here talking about the alignment of the frame to the cabinet back. The rear mounting brackets, they're meant to take this little slot, and there is a lot of play in there. So what that means is if your bracket is not perfectly aligned with the lines you make, if you're a 16th off either way, there's enough float in that drawer glide on that bracket that you're going to be fine. Uh, people can get awfully worked up about trying to get things exactly in the center of the hole. When you see me describing this, you have some play here. So don't don't lose sleep over it. You want to try to get it close, but don't lose sleep over it. The the door glide will walk back and forth. Okay, so Nick, if you can come down here, Mr. Cameraman, the way the template version starts off is you have to lay the frame on the cabinet back, and you want to line up the top and bottom of the frame dead even with your cabinet back. And you want this edge of the front of the cabinet back to line up with the center of that deeper spline groove. That's the assembly spline groove on your frame. So you want to line the edge up with the center of that on both sides. And again, if you're a little off one way or the other, you have that float factor. But try to line it up as close to dead center as you can. If you line up one, the other one should automatically be dead center. Okay, so now, Nick, let's go back up and get a vertical. This is so easy. All you have to do is take your pencil, make a line. You want to make it taller than the bracket so you can find these holes in a second, but make a line top and uh, side and [Music] bottom on all four openings, left and right. Or I should say, in your case, any front frame opening that's going to get a drawer.
Now I can remove the front frame because I've located the left and right sides and the top and bottom of all my uh, drawers. What we're going to do now is grab our bracket. And you'll notice the bracket has a series of holes all over the place. What I'm looking for is the center right between these two holes on left and right side. Okay, so on the left, the left bracket, lining those two holes up with the dead center of that line and the bottom flush with my cabinet bottom. That dat or dovetail represents my or dat represents the bottom of my cabinet, the floor of my cabinet. I can now go ahead and fix that one. This one is going to line up same thing. I'm going to use those two holes, and I'm going to line it up with the lower line, which is the opening of the front frame. So those two are super easy. These interior ones, same thing, but now I'm going to use this set of holes instead of this one. I'm using the outer set of holes for all these openings, line it up with a dead center and the cabinet bottom. And the same with this one, dead center and the bottom of my line. Okay, so I can go ahead and screw those down. Um, I do the same thing on the right side, but I'm not going to bore you.
Now what I want to do is take these off. Pretend you didn't want to use the template method. I'm going to show you the measurement method. What we're going to do is we're not going to honor any of these lines. Pretend they're not there. I'm leaving them on there for comparison purposes to show you how these work out. What we're going to do to find this line is we measure our front frame, and we measure from this shoulder, not the top shoulder, but the deep shoulder. Hook your tape measure on that deep groove and measure to the opening, and you see it's 16 and 5/8 of an inch. Okay, now, since that represents basically the edge of the plywood, I now hook this on the edge of the
plywood. I come in 16 and 5 /8, which is where my old line was, but now I'm going to deduct 5/8 of an inch, which brings me to 16. I'm going to strike a quick line here. And now, instead of using the outer hole, what I would have done there, this time, it just lines up with the dead center of the slot. So now I can use that dead center of the slot. I can ignore that line because we didn't use the template for the front frame. Pretend those aren't there, but you can see how it works out to be the exact same placement of the bracket. Whatever that opening is to the front frame opening, the duct 5/8 of an inch. Now I'm at the center. I'm going to use those two holes, same thing up here. It's going to be there's going to be a line in here instead when I come to this inner hole. I come in an inch and 5/8. So I come into 1 and 5/8 to there. Let me just strike a vertical line here to give you. And now, same thing. I'm going to use the center holes to line up that line. It ends up being the same thing as my original when I used the front frame as a template. Ends up being between those two holes, the same exact bracket placement. You're just getting at it a different way. Okay, so now that you've measured to get your left and right bracket placement, what about the verticals?
It's actually quite easy. Remember when we Ed the frame as a template, we just struck a line at the actual bottom. In this case, when you're measuring up, you're going to measure up your opening. This is the floor of the cabinet. You're going to measure up to the bottom of this opening up here, which is 8 and a/ qu if you can see that. And since this dat represents the cabinet back, which is flush with your opening and your front frame, you can just hook your tape here and come up the same 8 and a/ qu. And there you are. Okay, so it's very simple. If you have three drawers, you're going to measure up to the bottom of each opening. If there was another drawer up here, you'd measure to the bottom of that opening and transfer that vertical to there. And then on up the drawer box or the drawer front rather, the cabinet back to mark your drawer boxes, not hard at all.
Um, if you asked us our preference here in the shop, we're going to tell you use the front frame template all day long. The frame is a whole lot easier. Sometimes you're going to have a very large, big, huge wide vanity cabinet, very unwieldy, and you may find it easier just to do the manual measurement for certain frames. Now you're equipped with both methods, okay, the third option involves what happens if you got real froggy and you built your cabinet but you forgot to put your brackets on. Happens all the time, happens to us in the shops, and now you have to locate the brackets, but you can't use the cabinet front frame as a template anymore because it's built and now it's 2 feet apart from your cabinet back. And you also can't use the measurements I just gave you because now you're dealing with a cabinet wall that's sitting in here and occupying some of this edge here. So we're going to go ahead and build this vanity, um, and then we're we're going to come back and show you how to achieve those same dimensions or the same uh, result with different dimensions working off the cabinet side of an assembled box. So hang tight. We'll come back and show you that in a minute.
Okay, to wrap this video up on locating these brackets, we already showed you how to use the front frame as a template or to take dimensions on the raw cabinet back. Now we're going through what happens if you already built your cabinet and you have to mount the cabinets, the brackets to the back of the cabinet that's built. Very simple. Let's do the the left and right brackets, um, together first of all, we already know that the front frame hangs past by 3/4 of an inch. Um, you may have a situation where this is what we call a prep fall side and that cabinet side is flush with this, in which case it's a whole different set of issues, but let's assume you have your normal 3/4 offset.
You're going to come in 3/4 of an inch. You can see in the back, I've got a line there, and that represents those two two holes that we talked about earlier. You line up those two, the center of those two holes with that line and screw the bracket in place. Okay, so that's your outer bracket. The inner bracket, we're going to take the tape measure, put it against the cabinet wall, and we're going to come over to the front frame opening and it's 16 1 12 in. If you had a prep fall side that Dimension is going to be the same as the opening and you can just say it's 15 and 3/4, but let's this is the norm is the cabinet wall it's 16 and 2. I transfer that Dimension to the back of the cabinet 16 and 12 right there, and then I line up again those outer two holes. I line up the center of those outer two holes with my line, and you can see my original screw hole is right there, and I mount the bracket. So those two are easy to do using the cabinet wall as your reference point.
Okay, so hopefully that helps you with your bracket location for a standard custom-configured cabinet with normal sides. If you have any questions, talk to your cabinet coach. There's always nuances we can't cover all of them, but this video would be way too long. Another situation might be if your custom frame has a wide, we call a wide style, and you have a lot of cavity back here before you hit your cabinet side, well, obviously your drawer is going to start way out here. All these dimensions don't work. You really better use your template, your front frame as a template. So there's all sorts of nuances to the front frames that can cause some of what we're talking about to change based on your situation, but this covers most of your situations you'll run into during your assembly. We hope this helps. Give your cabinet coach a call if you have any questions at all. Thanks for watching. [Music]
