This is a knife drawer that I made for my wife for Christmas, to house
her cutlery collection. Like a lot of my projects, it turned into sort
of a career :-) so here it is finally done 3 weeks after Christmas. I
made it out of quartered red oak, to complement our existing
cabinetry. The drawer face is plain red oak, lacquered to match the
cabinets. The finish on the innards is a supposedly food-safe salad
bowl finish.

My wife has a large and varied cutlery collection, and it is always
changing as better knives come along and replace her older ones. I
needed something that could hold everything without a lot of space
lost to dividers and such. I also wanted her to be able to see at
least some of each blade, rather than have all of that hidden as in a
traditional knife block.

The design I came up with has four undivided shelves for knives, with
the shelves seperated vertically by 1/8". Each knife shelf has a
foam and plastic spring strip set into the bottom front to press down
on the knives from above and hold them firmly in place against the
wood. There is one special slot for a carving fork and one for a
steel. The rest of the shelf space pretty much works for all sized
knives, except that the really long bladed ones have to go on the
bottom shelves for blade clearance, while very small knives work best
on the top row.

I made the foam and plastic spring edges using UHMW tape and 3/8"
thick neoprene weatherstripping, as can be seen in one of the photos.
The foam is trapped in an angled dado so that the edge can't get
tugged out easily with a knife pul, and a slight dado edge guards the
leading edge of the UHMW tape to help keep it in place as well. These
foam and plastic springs really work well to hold the knives in place,
with a nice resistance feel as the knives are pushed in or pulled
out.

The front to back cove on the left side of the drawer was done so that
the knives on the bottom row can be more easily lifted out (since the
handles on that bottom row lay flat on wood). The 3 higher rows have
space under them, so the knife handles on those rows are easy to
grasp.

The drawer slides are 21.5" blumotion tandems - boy are they nice!
Id love to retrofit the rest of the drawers to these things one of
these days. When you close the drawer, it just gently glides in and
stops, regardless of how hard you shove it.


Tim