Drawer Installation Tips

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.