IKEA Alex Drawer Upgrade

I picked up a second-hand IKEA ALEX “Drawer unit on castors”. The outside looked great, but the drawer bottom panels had clearly been overloaded, so a few of them started to sag and partly give way. This wedge and cross-holder set fixes that and reinforces / upgrades the drawers so they can handle more load. You can use either part (or both), depending on your situation. The cross-holder pieces act as a cross brace: they use a wooden strip to tie the front and back of the drawer together and support the bottom panel. I recommend a strip that’s ~8 mm thick and up to 30 mm wide. Length is roughly 42 cm (measure your drawer to be sure). The screw holes are angled, so you can install everything without disassembling the drawer. I used 3.0×15 mm screws to attach the wedge and/or cross-holders to the front/back of the drawer, and 2.5×10 mm screws to fasten the cross-holders to the wooden strip. If you’d like to support my work, consider grabbing this model, or any of my other designs, on Cul