How to Plan a Systainer Wall

Sysport, Systainer wall, Systainer cabinet: the same build

Spend ten minutes on the Festool Owners Group and you will run into the word sysport. It comes from Festool's own SYS-PORT, the rolling Systainer cabinet with height-adjustable pull-outs that the company sells in a couple of sizes, and woodworkers took the name for the ones they build themselves. Whole threads run under it, with titles like Finally built my own Sysports and Dimensions for home made Sysports?.

The shop-built kind is not quite the object you buy. Festool's is a finished cart on locking castors at a fixed width. Yours is a carcass you size, so it can sit under a bench, stand along a wall as a bank of drawers, or roll on castors like the original. What does not change is the part that decides your cut list: a box riding a tray on a pair of slides, inside a carcass sized to hold it.

So if you came looking for sysport dimensions or sysport plans, this is the arithmetic behind them. The planner says "cabinet" because a bank can be any of those shapes, but it is the same thing you are asking about.

Start with the boxes you own

The mistake most people make is designing the cabinet first and then trying to make the boxes fit. Do it the other way around. A Systainer wall works because the cabinet is built around a known object: a box with a fixed footprint and one of a handful of standard heights. If you know which boxes you own, every dimension of the cabinet follows.

So make a list. Count your Systainers by size and height, the same way you would count parts for any job. If you need the exact numbers, the Systainer3 dimensions guide has the full chart: the 396, 508 and 792 mm lengths, the constant 296 mm depth, and the six standard M heights from 112 to 437 mm. Those are the inputs to everything below.

Step 1: size the width to the box

Width is the dimension people get wrong, because a Systainer does not just drop into a box the same size as itself. It rides on a pull-out tray, and the tray needs walls, and the drawer slides need air on each side. So the cabinet opening is a chain of small additions around the box length.

Written out, the cabinet opening equals the box length, plus a small fit gap on each side so the box sits on the tray with room to spare, plus the two tray walls, plus the drawer-slide clearance on each side. The outside width is that opening plus the two carcass sides. Every term is a real, measurable thing:

Change any input and the width moves. A thicker tray, a different slide, or half-inch plywood sides all shift the number, which is the whole reason to let a tool compute it rather than eyeballing. The slide clearance in particular depends on the slide type, covered in the drawer-slide guide.

Step 2: set the height and stack the boxes

Height has two parts: the outside height of the cabinet, and how the boxes stack inside it. For the outside, a comfortable shop base cabinet lands near 840 mm tall, about 33 inches, and that includes a toe kick of around 100 mm at the floor plus a top and bottom panel of about 19 mm each. Wall cabinets above the bench default to around 762 mm, or 30 inches, tall.

Inside the box, each pull-out Systainer eats a predictable slice of vertical space: the tray it sits on, its own height, and a clearance gap so it clears the box below and any slide hardware. A tight gap is around 6 mm, a comfortable one around 10 mm. So a single 137 mm box on a half-inch tray with a 6 mm gap uses about 155 mm of height. Stack boxes until the column fills the usable inside height, which is the outside height minus the toe kick, top and bottom panels.

If you would rather the cabinet grow to fit a tall stack exactly, that is a choice too: the height can snap up to the nearest System-32 grid step above the toe kick, so drawer fronts stay on the grid. Either way, the boxes drive the number.

Step 3: fill the wall

With one cabinet sized, a wall is just a row of them. Measure the wall, subtract for end gaps and any appliance or bench, and lay cabinets along it. Because each cabinet width is tied to a box size, you can mix cabinet widths on one wall: a couple of M-width cabinets for hand tools, an L-width for longer cases, and so on. A fill-wall step spreads or adds cabinets so the run finishes flush instead of leaving an awkward stub at the end.

This is where a systainer wall earns its keep as storage. Lower cabinets hold the heavy, frequently used cases as pull-out drawers. Upper cabinets, which do not need slides, just carry the boxes on adjustable shelves, so the shelf only needs to be about one Systainer deep, near 296 mm, plus the back. Plan the wall as a whole and the boxes you own map cleanly onto a face of drawers and shelves.

Step 4: get the cut list

Once the wall is laid out, the parts are fixed. Every cabinet is an open rack of carcass sides, a top and bottom, a back, and a pull-out tray per box, plus adjustable shelves for the uppers. Those parts have exact sizes, straight off the width and height chains above, so the cut list writes itself.

The payoff of doing it in a planner rather than by hand is that the numbers stay honest end to end. The saw kerf, the grain direction and the edgebanding are already taken out, the parts are arranged onto your sheets to waste the least wood, and you get a buy-this list of what to order. That is the difference between a nice drawing and a plan you can build this weekend.

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