Drawer Installation Tips
George VondriskaDescription
Mechanical drawer slides make it easy to open and close a drawer, but you’ve got to insert the drawer correctly to make sure you don’t destroy the slide and end up with bearings all over the floor. Check out these drawer installation tips.
Relevant Links:
DIY Dresser: Attaching Drawer Fronts
DIY Dresser: Cedar Dresser Drawer Liners
How To Make Self Closing Drawer Slides
It's sad, but true that sometimes when you put a drawer in a cabinet you lose your bearings, If you're not careful. Here's what I mean by that. Seen this happen a handful of times in classes. I often watch students when they put the drawer into the slides for the first time, kind of jam 'em and jam 'em and jam 'em. And pretty soon you hear this, tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! And what that sound is, is bearings falling down into the cabinet. And even our good friend, Sam, experienced this exact same problem. So here's the deal. If you look inside the slide, there's a very thin metal component right there, that the bearings are captured into. When you go to put the drawer in there, if that metal component is back here some place. When the component that's fastened to the drawer starts to slide in, it'll catch on the end of that. If you're not really, really careful. And then when people feel that resistance, they wanna overcome it. So they push, push, push, it deforms the end of that thin metal. And deforms it enough, what's gonna happen is, all the ball bearings are gonna fall out of it. So in a preemptive strike here, what you want to do when the drawer is ready to go in, is bring that piece forward. So it's tucked in right behind the front of the slide that protects it. Close that and then even with that step taken, when the drawer goes in the first time, just be careful, be gentle. So right there, you're going to feel a little bit of resistance because the drawer component, has to engage the case component. But it shouldn't, shouldn't have to pound on this to overcome it. And when you get it in there the right way, everything will operate just the way it's supposed to. And, thankfully, you're not gonna lose your bearings.
Installing these slides is much more complicated than that and are often not much fun. Squareness of the cabinet and drawer are critical and this can be the point when "close enough" isn't good enough. The thickness of each slide is 1/2", so you will lose 1" there. The tolerance is typically up to 1/16", which means plus or minus 1/32" but it can't be less than the 1" difference between the width of the drawer opening and the drawer itself. Additionally, the slides need to be aligned exactly parallel to each other. All oily, they're no fun to handle. There are a lot of slide jigs that can help, but they're often as awkward to use than not. You really need 3 hands: 2 to hold the slide in position and one to insert the screws. Depending on your cabinet design, using clamps can help, but you have to be careful not to deform the slide and it still takes 3 hands to get it in the correct position. Getting slide installation right is a matter of skill and luck. The more skill you have, the less luck you you'll need. The bearings will usually fall out when too much force is placed on closing or opening the slides, especially with opening. The end cap(s) can be dislodged and the bearings will fall out, going everywhere. While they can be replaced, if you can recover most of them, the end caps tend to be pulled out again, so it's best to replace the slide(s) at that point. This is more common with aging slides. Replacement in that situation is fairly easy since you can use the old slide holes as guides to mounting the new slides, assuming the old slides were installed correctly. As far as evaluating the online, slide quality reviews is concerned, those who have trouble installing them will often get frustrated and blame it on the slides themselves. I have not seen any significant difference in slide performance based on price, so it's probably okay to go for the least expensive, especially if you're going to need a bunch of them.
The simplest way is always the better, and in this case the solution is to use concealed runners for wooden drawers. Drawers more efficient, reliable and better looking
What brand of slides did you use in your video?
Какую на грузку выдерживает ящик.