I am making a credenza for video and audio components that will include 4 sliding doors. In thinking about the sliding mechanism itself, it seems to make sense to use a spline seated in a groove in the door. This will avoid having a tongue of door material oriented at the wrong angle and potentially creating some drag as the door moves.
Long story short, I am looking for advice regarding the best wood to use for a sliding door spline. What will slide smoothly and have the durability to last for years?? Thanks all.
Dave B
Replies
Wooden spines are great for joining two things together. Sooner or later it will do a great job of joining your sliding door to the frame. I don't see a wooden spline working for your application.
The entire door riding in a groove would work better, but is still problematic.
I used lee valley sliding door hardware that a lot of pros use And it works great no friction and lasts hope this helps.
If you put in a spline of material more durable than the rest of your project it will dig its own groove over time.
Make your door, then cut back the stiles by 1/32" or so on the bottom to avoid your cross grain wear concerns. Make the upper groove deep enough to lift out the door so you can clean the groove and re-apply wax from time to time.
I built a cherry cabinet and made the spline out of cherry as well. I put a low friction self adhesive "tape" in the bottom of the dado. The spline "rides" on the tape and it creates a nice 1/32" reveal between the door and the rail. I've attached a photo of my well worn cabinet which still has smooth sliding doors.
For some reason when I attached the image it got rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise.
Here are two takes on this from amateur woodworkers, the first was done by my father in the early sixties and it still serves us daily since then. It has two nylon strips inserted in grooves in the case and the doors receive two nylon pads each. The second is an all wood version of mine I built a few months ago.
The first cabinet I built with sliding doors, I used plastic grooved tracks for the doors to slide in. I don't remember now where I got them but, I'm sure, they are still available. However, It didn't take long for them to get gummed up with dust and goo to the point the doors would no longer slide smoothly. The tracks were a real nuisance to clean.
The next time I made sliding doors, I put a hardwood spline in the cabinet bottom and a groove in the bottom of the door to ride the spline like a RR track. This worked great. At first I was concerned that the spline/track would be a nuisance because of the way it projected above the cabinet bottom. But, that turned out to not be a problem. And, It didn't tend to collect dust and goo like the groove did. I think it might work even better if the spline/track is made of HDPE.
Just musing here as I have no personal experience of making such a door.
How often is it going to be used though? Many of these doors will be opened less than once per month, so wear is perhaps not a big issue.
Before plastic runners or metal slides, most drawers used to be simply wood on wood, often a secondary wood too.
Over time these do wear down, but it takes an awful lot of uses and of course drawers are probably heavier than the door.
Whilst I do like the low-friction PTFE tape idea, and were I to build something like this that is the idea I would use, I would also be relatively unconcerned about longevity with using any reasonably hard wood. If you can't mark it with your fingernail, then in this application I suspect it will outlive you, tape or not.
Pretty much all the doors of this type that I have seen have had the door running in a groove as described by @_MJ_ and this is in part because narrower runners in grooves will often be tighter than wider shallower grooves. It also makes cleaning easy and there is no fragile edge to manage.
If you don't want to use a groove on the bottom then you can always use top-hanging systems to support the door on a rail. A bit of Aluminium U profile and some skateboard bearings will last until the end of time.
seth janofsky, issue #172 has a very good article on sliding doors. Basically, rabbet the top and bottom of the doors to ride in a groove- but, the bottom of the door rides on its shoulder, not the bottom of the groove. I've used this method numbers of times, it works really well. If the doors are flat, once you wax the mating parts, it's sweet.
I prefer to have the bottom of the spline ride on the bottom of the groove so you can create a nice reveal between the shoulder and, in my case, the supporting rail.
I agree that shadow line looks good. The reasoning about riding on the rabbeted shoulder is that dust and debris is more likely to accumulate in the bottom of the groove, and if the spline/door bottom runs on the bottom of that groove, there can be interference. IMO, a compelling rationale.
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