I've been working on a fairly involved project as a Christmas gift for a friend for the past few weeks. I'm building a Dungeon Master's screen for use in Dungeons & Dragons games. I'm having a couple of issues due to my design.
The first issue is that when it came time to put together one of the panels on the screen, the one holding six drawers, I ran into issues because I realized that my measurements used up the exact width and height of the box containing them, and didn't leave any breathing room for the drawers to actually slide in and out.
The drawers CAN fit in the box, but it's a very tight fit, and I worry about the surrounding supports, which are only glued together, breaking off if I pull too hard to remove a drawer, let alone the fact that it would be extremely irritating to actually use them.
The only solution I've been able to think of is to sand down the sides of the drawers enough to give the drawers some space so they won't be pressing right up against the walls. However, I don't have a belt sander or anything... I only have hand tools. I could BUY a cheap belt sander from Harbor Freight, but money is tight after the holidays and I want to avoid that if possible.
I've been using sandpaper, a file, and a cheapo detailing plane to smooth out and remove some width from the sides, but it isn't doing much.
The second issue is that I made the poor decision to use 1/4" plywood instead of 1/2" plywood for everything, so now I can't figure out how to attach hinges to the sides of the panels so that they can be folded together, because 1/4" is probably too thin to attach screws to.
I need the hinges for the three panels to fold together into a single box, some sort of handle for carrying the box, and then some sort of clasps or locks to bind it shut. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to handle this with the thickness of plywood I'm dealing with?