Setting cabinet handles without guessing

The problem is repetition, not accuracy

Anybody can mark one handle correctly with a tape and a square. A kitchen is not one handle. It is twenty five doors and drawers that all have to land in the same place relative to their own edges, and doing that by measurement means twenty five chances to be a sixteenth out.

The eye is very good at catching that. A single handle sitting slightly low reads as sloppy across the whole run, even to someone who cannot say what is wrong. A jig turns a measuring job into a positioning job, and positioning repeats.

Two settings, and they do different things

The first setting is the hole spacing, the center to center distance your handle needs. Our 5 inch jig covers 2 1/2 through 5 inches in half inch steps, and the longer template carries on up to 6 1/2 for wide drawer pulls. The holes take a 4mm bit.

The second setting is edge distance, which is how far in from the door edge the whole pair sits. That one is adjusted at the nut in the middle, and it is the setting that decides whether a run of doors looks deliberate. Set it once and leave it alone for the entire kitchen.

The order that keeps a run matching

Do all the doors first, then all the drawers, and inside each group work left to right without touching the jig. Every time the setting changes, you have started a new batch that has to agree with the last one by luck.

Test on the back of a spare door or an offcut of the same thickness before the first real hole. The jig is aluminum and holds its setting, but the setting is only right once you have seen a handle in it. Two minutes on scrap covers a mistake that would otherwise be drilled into a cabinet front.

Drill from the face, back the exit

Handles are seen from the front, so the front is the side that has to be clean. Drill from the face and any splintering happens on the inside where a screw head covers it. Clamp a scrap block behind the hole and there is usually nothing to cover.

Come out of the wood at speed with the drill still turning. Backing out slowly is what widens a hole and leaves the screw loose in a door that gets pulled a dozen times a day. The jig folds shut at the middle nut afterwards and lives in a drawer until the next room.

Doors and drawers do not share a rule

The habit that catches people out is treating a kitchen as one setting. Door handles are normally set in from the outer stile, vertically, near the corner away from the hinge. Drawer pulls are normally centered horizontally on the front. Those are two different references, and the jig has to be told which one it is doing.

Buy the handles before you drill anything, because the spacing your hardware needs decides the setting and there is no way to work backwards from a hole. A pull that measures 3 inches on the packaging is usually the hole spacing rather than the overall length, and confirming which is which on the first one costs nothing.

Measure the screws against the door

The screws in the handle packet are cut for an average door and yours might not be it. Too short and the handle never pulls up tight against the face. Too long and the thread stands proud on the inside of the door where it catches on everything that goes past.

Hold a screw against the edge of a door before the run starts and see where it lands. Thicker fronts often want a longer screw than the one supplied, and finding that out on door one is a trip to the hardware store. Finding it out on door twenty is the same trip with nineteen handles waiting.