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Drawer Guides Make your Life Slide By.

Picking the right drawer guides for the project you’re building comes down to many factors. Certain guides favor certain projects more like kitchen cabinets or fine furniture. It’s not hard to find hybrid furniture using traditional construction methods but installing modern ball-bearing guides for long life. You can also find the most modular cabinets with ingenious guide systems. But you have to consider what the guide will do to decide.

Some items to consider when deciding on drawer guides but not limited to, are;

• What is the weight of the drawer load to be?
• Will the drawer fully extend?
• Do you want the guides to be seen?
• Is a particular guide material needed?
• Is this for new or retrofit work?
• Can the guides be mounted from the bottom?
• Can the guides be mounted from the side?

Drawer Guides Can Be All Wood.

Though they are not very common, they are still quite desirable by traditionalists and renovators of older furniture and built in millwork. Often wood guides were coated in wax to keeping them operating smoothly. It wasn’t uncommon, and still is, for wood drawer guides to bind up and stick when wood connections wear down. This is usually the point when the guides need to inspected for excessive wear and the decision needs to be made to restore or replace to modern guides. Not always the easiest of projects, many aftermarket options are available to update the guides no longer enjoying their original operation.

Wood runners are usually found in intricate wood frames in traditional furniture. Many of the early 20^th century and earlier built-in furniture in homes and older institutions, for example libraries and elite homes, also had wood drawer guides that you can find in many renovated homes even today.

Drawer Guides Can Be All Metal.

Metal drawer guides have been the mainstay for drawer guides since the earlier part of the last century. Though they were heavily used for file cabinets they found their way into kitchen cabinets that were favoring metal exteriors. The first examples of full-blown semi-fitted metal kitchens that I know of were in the 1930s.

These guides were often spot welded, which makes replacement a chore. For one reason there’s not enough material to screw a new guide to the drawer as the drawer side was less than a 1/16″ of material but cutting the weld doesn’t always have the best of results either.

Sometimes rivets were used to fasten the guides to the drawers. This made life a little easier but updating with self-enclosed bolts use to be tricky. The last kitchen metal cabinets I saw were in Arlington, MA maybe early 1990’s. I sand blasted and spray painted the exteriors of those cabinets and scraped my knuckles updating the drawer guides.

Sorry no Polaroid‘s of the work.

Drawer Guides Can Be All Plastic.

Plastic guides come in different materials such as nylon, Teflon coated plastic and straight plastic. I clump them all into the category of plastic drawer guides. You’ll find these types of guides most commonly in knock down furniture from box stores or stores catering to modular furniture buffs. They are usually hot glued or stapled into the cabinet carcass and slide in a dado in the side of the drawer assembly.

The biggest issue with this type of setup is that the plastic guide, even thought not extensively used, wears down the wrapped particleboard on the drawer side pretty quickly if the furniture wasn’t assembled with some care. Unless there’s no alternative, this type of furniture usually isn’t considered for retrofitting. Repairs is all the can be offered and the repairs can’t be considered long term but enough to get a student or a home office by till better arraignments can be made.

Here’s a great and short guide from one of my favorite woodworking stores on how to pick the different features that a drawer guide can come with.

 

Handy4homes offers services in Arlington, Belmont, Lexington and Winchester MA, if you think you need an installation or an upgrade, choose us for the job.

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