drawer side. The table is fitted with traditional wooden drawer stops that go immediately behind the face. The runners and side guides have been waxed to promote smooth movement.
The following is excerpted from Nancy R. Hiller’s “Kitchen Think: A guide to design and construction, from refurbishing to renovation.”
For two decades, Nancy made a living by turning limitations into creative, lively and livable kitchens for her clients. This, her final how-to book, is an invitation to learn from both her completed kitchen designs (plus kitchens from a few others) and from the way she worked.
Unlike most kitchen design books, “Kitchen Think” is a woodworker’s guide to designing and furnishing the kitchen, from a down-to-the-studs renovation to refacing existing cabinets. And Nancy shows you how it can be done without spending a fortune or adding significantly to your local landfill.
In this excerpt Nancy gives options for mounting drawers – handy when facing a kitchen renovation or for any casework where a drawer is included.
1. Wooden Slides
Traditionally, drawers have slid on wooden runners: strips of wood tenoned into horizontal rails at the face of a cabinet. 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.
Wooden runners have several qualities to recommend them:
• They work wonderfully when drawers are well-fitted. 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.
• Their only cost is your labor.
• The drawer front is the finished face.
• They let your drawer sides and joinery shine without intrusion by metal hardware.
At the same time, wooden drawer slides are less than ideal in some respects:
• They don’t allow for full extension. Once you pull the drawer out to a certain point, it will sag and can fall out of its opening.
• A well-fitted drawer can stick in humid weather where humidity fluctuates significantly.
For decades, cabinetmakers have had access to mechanical slides, the features of which have improved steadily. Today there’s a variety of options offered by manufacturers such as Blum, Accuride, Salice, Knape & Vogt and more. I cover just a couple here.
Mechanical slides have a few advantages over traditional wooden runners, even if they lack the cachet that comes with a piston-fit drawer. 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.
2. Side-mounted Ball Bearing Slides
Side-mount ball bearing slides, such as those made by Accuride, are affordable, dependable and hardwearing. 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. Other advantages include:
• They’re extremely 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.
• They 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. Beyond this, you can use these slides on drawers that are deeper (from front to back) or shallower than the slides, depending on your application.
• It doesn’t matter how your drawer bottom fits into the drawer, i.e. whether it’s flush at the bottom surface, fitted in slips, or slid into grooves in the drawer front and sides.
• While this flexibility may not sound so impressive in principle, it can be a life-saver in rare circumstances where you need the combination of affordable price, full extension and flexibility in drawer construction that such hardware allows.
These slides allow the drawer to be removed simply by disengaging a lever. To replace the drawer, slide it carefully into position – if you don’t align the parts perfectly, you can damage the slides – then push until you hear a “click.” Now pull the drawer out and close it fully to check the fit.
Before you install set screws, the slides are adjustable up and down in addition to forward and backward, thanks to slots on both parts – the part that goes on the drawer and the part that goes in the cabinet. Some models also have screwdriver-adjustable cams.
As for drawbacks, side-mounted ball bearing slides are not completely silent; there’s a metal-on-metal sound when the arms of the slides are closing or opening, but it’s minor. These slides also take up some width. This space varies somewhat, depending on the model; most require 1/2″ on each side. As a result, in most applications, you need to cover the front of the drawer with an applied face. This face can be inset, as shown here, half overlay or full overlay.
When choosing these or other mechanical slides, read the specs and installation instructions to make sure the slides are compatible with your design.
My least favorite feature of these slides is their visibility. Although they come in different finishes (many lines are available in white, black and stainless, in addition to zinc), they do detract from the pristine beauty of a nicely finished drawer side – at least, when the drawer is open. When the drawer is closed, the slides are invisible.
3. Self-closing Undermount Slides
Since about the turn of the millennium, cabinetmakers have had access to a type of slide that combines full extension and smooth, silent operation with almost complete invisibility. The Blum Tandem is the most widely known version, but as soon as other manufacturers saw how popular the new design was with cabinet manufacturers and their customers, they began devising their own variations on the theme.
Not only are these slides silent, smooth-running, full extension and invisible, when fitted with the right locking devices (available from the same suppliers as the slides themselves), they offer a new dimension in adjustability over previous kinds of drawer slide hardware. You can move the drawer face up or down, forward or backward, tilt it to make it flush with the face frame and move it from side to side – a boon when you’re dealing with inset drawer faces in particular. These features come with some strict requirements:
• There are precise dimensional requirements: Drawers must be just the right width and depth (front to back) to fit specific slides. These and other specifications are laid out in a handy instruction guide published by hardware manufacturers.
• There needs to be a 1/2″ recess beneath the drawer bottom so that the sides and front will conceal the runners.
• You need to drill a couple of holes at the back of the drawer for the tilt mechanism.
• Because the position of the slide hardware is fixed in relation to the drawer sides (it has to go below the drawer bottom), you need to be more precise in positioning the hardware inside the cabinet than you do with sidemounted ball bearing hardware. You must also leave more clearance in height than with side-mounted hardware, which can eat up space, depending on other elements of a cabinet’s design.
As with the side-mounted slides, there will be a bit of space on either side of the drawer with undermount hardware. This space works out to about 5/16″ on each side. An applied drawer face hides the gaps.
Nancy’s book and articles guided me through a full gut kitchen renovation right after the book came out. Her instruction was invaluable and the kitchen came out perfect because of it.