My kitchen cabinets (in our 12 year old house) have 6 large drawers (32Wx21). Four of them are 7″ deep, two are more shallow. The original slides are side mount (not soft close), and I cannot find a brand name on them. The deep ones have a hefty load – glass bowls, cast iron pans, etc. My wife requested soft close slides. I researched and found the Lontan soft close were decently rated for a budget slide.
I installed new Lontan 22″ soft close, full extension slides on three of the drawers. Remember this is existing cabinetry, so I’m working on the floor, reaching in, working at odd angles. I did my best to get things square. However, performance is marginal. The shallow drawer works fine empty, but when loaded with kitchen tools (big spoons, can opener, etc.) the soft close mechanism struggles to close the drawer. Worse for the deep drawers. They don’t work that well empty and worse loaded.
So, is this a case of operator error? Do I just need to be more careful about squaring things up?
Or is it a case of ‘you get what you pay for’? Do I need to bite the bullet, buy better slides to get decent performance? If so what side mount slide would you recommend?
I need to buy 3 more slides to do the other drawers, so I might as well buy the right ones if that would fix things.
Thanks for your help
Replies
Best thing you can do for yourself is to make plywood spacers to rest the inside parts on during installation. Trying to follow a measurement or line is doomed to fail. Adding double-stick tape behing them frees up your third hand to help with the screws. Pre-drill or at least punch the holes for the screws to reduce drifting.
I second _mj_'s recommendation. If you start with the top drawer you only need one piece of plywood as you can just cut it shorter as you come down, and you can keep it flat against the side of the case. Slide your spacer straight across, don't flip it end for end. If your cut isn't dead level you will reverse the high and low ends of the slide.
Yep....what they both said. But the fact that they work good empty and not when loaded may also indicate a slide quality problem or simply overloading them. I would consider upgrading to a better slide and make sure to get enough load rating.
I just mounted ball bearing slides on several drawers, some observations. As mentioned above, use spacers to get them close. Do the initial instal with the elongated slots then adjust to get a good fit, then use the small round holes to fix the glide in place. I used 100 pound rated slides, not that I needed them for the load, I just did not them to fail from repeated use. In one job I got the soft close slides but when I tried a model instal, I thought it took too much force to open them so I switched to the regular ones.
One story about repairing bad glides on a desk. It was the bottom drawer and one of the original glides was lost. So I got new ones, crawled in the opening and guessed where to instal the new ones as they were a different make. I was close. Slight adjustment, expected to be there for a while as these can be fussy and I was inside a dark hole. Bingo, perfect! Major miracle!! Good luck.