The plastic handles on my metal file cabinet had cracked and broken, so I decided to replace them with handles made from bolts, nuts and eye screws. I remember seeing this idea in an old issue of Readymade, but I searched for it online and went through every back issue I own and couldn’t find it. Anyway, I’ll give them the credit since I’m pretty sure I didn’t imagine it.
My drawers had a 3 3/4″ spread between the holes, so I used 4″ bolts. In hindsight, I probably should have used 4 1/2″ bolts because it was kind of a tight fit.
You can see how I assembled everything in the photo above. The long bolt became the handle and the small eye screws are the projections that fasten it to the drawer. I used nuts to hold all the pieces in place.
These probably wouldn’t hold up to heavy use, but I think they will work just fine for a file cabinet.
It seems this design is missing a couple of bolts. How does the pull not slide to the outside face of the drawer? You would need a nut on the inside and outside of the drawer on the eye bolt…
Hi Bob,
It works on these file cabinets because the threads of the bolts rest on the thin metal face of the cabinet.
This is an idea you can customize to your own needs. There are so many different possible combinations. You can do whatever you like!