blum undermount drawer slides installation

BLUM UNDERMOUNT DRAWER SLIDES INSTALLATION INSTALL
BLUM UNDERMOUNT DRAWER SLIDES INSTALLATION FULL

They’re fantastically easy to install in casework - you can put them almost anywhere you want, mounting the support to the cabinet side or using mounting plates to attach the hardware to the cabinet’s front and back - and only impose one constraint on the dimensions of your drawer: The width of the drawer must be at or just a hair under the precise width between the slides once they’ve been installed.

They come with a huge variety of optional features, among them a detent (helpful in cases where you want to use whatever is on the pull-out surface, such as a keyboard, without the drawer or tray closing when you touch it) extra-heavy load capacity specialty slides for file drawers, lateral files, and so forth. Side-mount ball bearing slides such as those made by Accuride are affordable, dependable, and hard wearing. They’re quiet, smooth-running, and allow you to pull a drawer out fully without danger of it tipping its contents all over the floor, or worse, falling out and being damaged. Mechanical slides have a few advantages over traditional wooden runners, even if they lack the cachet that comes with a piston-fit drawer. Today there’s a dizzying variety of options offered by manufacturers such as Blum, Accuride, Salice, Knape & Vogt, and more. Dust boards are a feature of traditional furniture fitted with drawers.įor decades now, cabinetmakers (traditionally a term that applies to makers of furniture as well as built-ins) have had access to mechanical slide hardware, the features of which have improved steadily since I was introduced to such hardware at my first woodworking job in 1981. Also visible is the dust board, a thin piece of wood that resembles a cabinet bottom. The pyramidal object on the front rail is a traditional drawer stop.

To the left of the runner is a low-profile guide to keep the drawer from moving laterally as it’s opened and closed. The drawer runner is visible on the left side of the cabinet, where you can see that it’s tenoned albeit with a bit of a gap) into the front rail. View into the drawer opening of a 1903 English factory made sideboard. A well fitted drawer can stick in humid weather in locales where humidity fluctuates significantly from season to season.(The well fitted example shown above is still stable at more than 3/4 of the way out.)

BLUM UNDERMOUNT DRAWER SLIDES INSTALLATION FULL

They don’t allow for full extension: Once you pull the drawer out to a certain point, it will sag and can even fall out of its opening.They let your drawer sides and joinery shine without intrusion by metal hardware.Īt the same time, wooden drawer slides are less than ideal in some respects.They allow your drawer front to function as a finished face no other face (“dummy” or “false”) need be applied.They require no additional financial investment beyond your labor, whereas mechanical slides cost money.When it comes to fine furniture, they’re the gold standard, not least because it takes finesse to make a drawer fit snugly while not so tightly that it’s a challenge to open and close. They work wonderfully when drawers are well fitted.Wooden runners have several qualities to recommend them: In casework where a drawer will not be guided by the cabinet’s sides - for example, when the cabinet has a face frame that protrudes into the drawer opening - the runners are fitted with guides to keep the drawers from sliding left or right and binding as they’re closed. Traditionally, drawers have slid on wooden runners: strips of wood tenoned into horizontal rails at the face of a cabinet. A well fitted drawer on traditional wooden runners is a pleasure to use.

Blum undermount drawer slides installation