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Swingman
 
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Default Troubleshooting drawer slides

"PetQuality" wrote in message

Where do I begin?


Start with the drawers ... if they are too wide, you will have to somehow
trim/plane one or both drawer sides until the drawer width falls within the
guidlines of your slides.

If they are too narrow, you will have to shim the drawer slides. If both of
these are in play, then do what you have to do with a combination of
shimming and trimming and take the last sentence below to heart.

With that out of the way ...

There is some wiggle room built into the slides themselves and you can
generally get a sense of where things are wrong pretty quickly with just a
couple of screws on each slide, and by taking advantage of the built in
adjustment holes in the slides themselves.

Remove all but two screws on each side, leave one in the front, one in the
back. Make sure the screws are in the MIDDLE of holes that allow the most
vertical adjustment, as that is where the problem often is.

(You can usually tell quickly if the drawer slides are not lined up with
each other along their length/height by closing the drawer and seeing if one
side of the drawer want to be further inside the cabinet than the other, or
higher on one side, or if it rocks excessively in any plane ... if so,
rectify that situation first, with the front screws)

Leave the back screws just loose enough to allow the slides to move out of
any bind as you close the drawer. Does it now close easier? If so, open the
drawer and tighten up the back screws a bit at a time, repeating the open
and close routine, until the drawer works like you want it.

If not, loosen the two front screws a bit and repeat the process,
alternately tightening from front to back, side to side as you go.

If the above doesn't work at all, then chances are you've got a problem with
the width of the installation. If it gets more difficult to close as you
tighten the screws in the first above, you may need to shim one, or both, of
the slides at the back, or vice versa.

Good luck ... and don't settle for less than perfection. The more you work
at getting it "perfect", the more you learn, the more your intuition becomes
finely tuned, and the quicker the process becomes for the next drawer.

IME, most of the problems with drawer slides stem from the cabinet or drawer
sides, or both, not being square and that generally comes from like parts
not being BATCH cut to the same size ... doing that one step can save you
all the time and frustration of going through the above.

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Last update: 11/06/05