If I had a better answer I would have posted it, and maybe bought some myself since my Sears-flavored tool cabinets need repair. The second-hand tool store that rates cheap and customer-proof well above pretty uses Vidmars for the heavy cutting tools and racks of sheet metal bins for the lighter stuff.
I've found that as I've become older and cheaper that appearance is highly over rated ;-)
Well I was thinking if I went with wood I'd just make the boxes, and not bother with fancy drawer faces, or if I went with metal I'd just rivet the drawer pulls to the boxes.
I still envisioned them as looking like they were made the same and being being roughly even down the whole length of the bench.
I see MSC stocks Vidmar. Even with my discount... Yee-ouch! Might as well buy Mac or snap-On. LOL. Well maybe not. You don't have to chase the MSC truck for 6 months if you have a bad item. LOL.
I would have suggested making plywood drawers with slides and perhaps faces of red oak, which I spent the summer sawing into planks and beams for future projects. However this morning I saw a 3' red oak stair tread in a hardware store priced at $35, and larger ones up to $48.
That's ludicrous.
The local hardwood yard has 5/4 red oak for 4.50 a board foot.
For what you want to do I would try and find some used office file cabinets and/or desks that would work. Put them in place, rearrange them to taste and then make your bench over the top. Fill in the remainder as you find more that will work. But I've become super frugal and try not to be in a hurry to get anything like that done. If you need or want things NOW you pay a steep price (shrug).
Here is a very similar to mine in appearance office desk:
Not practical to drive after though :)
Well after much thought I figure I'll go with 3/4 plywood and pocket screws with Titebond. Now to find a good source for a gazillion 300lb and a few 500lb drawer slides. I've made a few 3/4 ply drawers already in my existing benches, and they are extremely strong. The nice thing is if time runs short I can just make them in batches.
Personally, I'd use box joints for the drawer sides; much stronger.
Well, box joints are certainly stronger. I agree, but they fail in the faster department. I have glued and screwed drawers with hundreds of pounds of bolts, motors, etc in them now. They are several years old. The slides will fail from overloading before the drawers do.
I'm not a wood worker by trade or hobby, I don't get excited by the process, and I don't care about pretty. I doubt I'll even put false fronts on them. Probably just hack a dip in the front so I have a place to grab them.
I would add that depending on details we aren't talking about 5-6 drawers or even a dozen or twenty. I am looking at around 90-100 drawers in that span. Making one box doesn't take all that long, but making a hundred of them sure does.
If all the boxes are uniform in size, it would seem feasible to build a jig that lets one gang-cut the box-joints with a router; stack a dozen or two 3/4" sides/fronts/backs (if square draws) on edge, clamp, place a homemade router guide jig over the edges and route away.
May be a wash timewise when compared with screwing and glueing.
I'll have to think about that. Its worth consideration. It has the advantage of not worrying about the shifting force with pocket hole screws.
Mounting the router in a router table would make fixturing easier.
I wouldn't want to try to move a 9" thick stack of 20"x8"[*] plywood pieces on edge across a router table. Much easier to move the router in this case and keep the material stationary.
[*] Assuming a 20" wide by 8" deep drawer.
If only my CNC router were a little bigger. Ok, about ten times bigger. LOL.
I've got a couple of notched front drawers with exposed slides. Saw dust ge ts in the drawers and on the slides. I assume metal dust would too.
1/4? ply fronts is all you'd need to seal them up a bit.
A simple jig would solve the shifting force issue. Just a "right angled slot" screwed to a plywood base all you'd need to hold the drawer side in place as you screw. Kind of like a raised dado in the shape of a drawer.
I wouldn't want to either, that's a task a bandsaw (or my sawmill) could rough out and a jointer or thickness planer could finish, but a table saw is the better choice. The router would cut the edge detail separately for each piece, guided by the fixture clamped to the table.
My father and I made a batch of t&g flooring on his Shopsmith, set up like a horizontal-shaft table router. The saw fence was the width guide and we clamped on scrap wood blocks to hold the flooring strips against the table, so they only needed to be pushed through by the next strip. I used the Shopsmith the same way with a saw blade to cut the edge tongues and grooves in cabinet panel doors.
I've no experience with making drawers for holding hundreds of lbs. of motors and such, but, I absolutely would not simply use Titebond and pocket screws with plywood. Pocket screws are not appropriate, imo, for any drawer and gluing plywood edge grain to face grain is also a no no in my book, especially if strength is an issue.
Personally, I wouldn't even use plywood, I'd use 1x material with at a bare minimum of locking rabbited drawer joints and glue. No screws needed but could clamp with nail gun for speed while glue dries. This would be very fast for multiple drawers of a standard size on just your table saw, and way stronger than pocket screws, glue and plywood.
Also it's worth noting that drawers do not need to be the full height of the drawer opening. The drawers mainly just need to keep the items from rolling off the drawer. You can save a lot of material with 100 drawers that way. Use plywood for the bottoms.
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