One-hand drawer conversion

Motivation and Benefits

With each year passing, the cars on our streets are getting bigger and bigger. In order to still get to all the things that you would like to throw into the trunk of your camper van, I recommend building yourself some nice heavy duty, full extension drawers, like I did. If you are like me and prefer using your car in the mountains rather than on flat surface, I would recommend drawer slides which lock the drawers at both the extended and retracted position. One major disadvantage of those is that you need both hands to pull out the drawer. Hence, I created these models to allow easy conversion of the default two-hand operation to one-handed opening and closing of the drawers. Since you most likely will use slightly different slides or build the drawers differently than I did, I provide the original Autodesk Fusion 360 model file, which is completely parametric and therefore easy to adopt to your built.

Construction

Printed parts

I printed all parts from PETG, but ASA would also be a good option. I don't recommend using PLA, which will deform in the summer in your car.

The total print needs approximately 150 g of filament, if you print an extremely strong version, like I did. 

Attention: you need to print two mirrored versions of the cap part. One is for the left and one for the right side. I simply mirrored the file in the slicer.

Slicing settings

Infill: 20% gyroid

Supports: No supports are needed.

Brim: The handles need to be printed in vertical orientation and I recommend using a brim for those parts. The other parts don't need a brim.

Perimeters: 3-5 perimeters depending on your desire for strength

Nozzle: 0.4 mm

Layer thickness: 0.2 mm

Additional hardware

• Heavy duty full extension drawer slides, I used Junker KV2-200-H76-L800-LC
• Mounting brackets for the slides
• Drawer
• 8 mm stainless steel rod
• 16x M4x4.0 mm threaded inserts, like those
• 8x M4x10 mm screws
• 4x M4 set screws
• 4x M4x6 mm screws

Assembly

• add heat inserts to all parts
• remove the rubber covers from the drawer slide handles
• add the caps to the drawer slide handles by sliding them on from the outside
• measure the inner width between the cap pieces 
• cut the rod to size by adding the hole depth of the caps to the measured width and subtract 2-4 mm as a gap inside the hole
• slide the handle and guide pieces over the rod
• mark the position of the guides and drill holes accordingly into the drawer
• fix the guides to the drawer using the M4x10 mm screws
• assemble all parts together as pictured and fix the handle and the rod within the cap pieces with the M4 set screws
• optional: if you need to you can secure the caps from the side with small screws, though for me the fit of the caps was very tight and therefore I didn't need the screws

Feedback

I would love to see your makes and get feedback from you, how the models worked for your built. During building my drawer, I already thought about an improvement of my model by using a rectangular tube instead of the round rod to connect the left and right handles. This way you don't need to secure the rod from turning within the caps and the handle from turning on the rod. I had plenty of 8 mm stainless steel rod lying around, so I used that, but if you need to buy the hardware anyway you could think about using a square tube.