Side-Hung drawers

Drawer contents

Lee Schierer - McKean, PA

>Drawer contents and frequency of use will dictate the success or failure of your drawers. They heavier the load and more frequent they are opend/closed, the more quickly you will see wear an problems.

AAlthough I have used this method for drawer support many times, I prefer to use metal slides as they give the best performance for heavily loaded or frequently used drawers.

Lee

A couple other things...

Ellis Walentine

>Side hung drawers are wonderful, but as Lee suggested, they aren't my choice for file drawers or desk drawers that will get a lot of use or carry a heavy load. Don't get me wrong: if you engineer and make them well, they will work fine for a long time. But, I'm coming from my years in the contract furniture industry, where we cycle tested all our drawer slides at full, evenly distributed load, to the tune of something like 175,000 or 250,000 cycles. Even with two woods that have perfectly mated side hardnesses, properly made and lubricated, I would not imagine they will last as long as the steel-ball-bearing heavy-duty slides. I'd let the projected duty cycles be your guide.

Getting back to wood selection, be sure you choose runners and drawer sides that are similar in density. If you use harder runners, they will wear out the grooves faster. I've even gone so far as to inset exotic wood slips in softwood drawer sides (such as pine), just so they would ride slicker, faster and longer on my white oak runners.

Another thing is that if you want drawer stops, you have to design them into the drawer and cabinet somehow. There are a couple ways to do this with screws and/or little wooden or brass tabs, but they're all a lot of work.

Also, think about the relationship of the width of the drawer to the depth (front to back). In a case with 36"W x 14"D drawers, you're getting up into the range where racking may well be a problem, particularly if the drawer has too much slop in its fit into the cabinet.

Aesthetically, you can design around anything -- not saying it will be as slick as you would like -- including wooden drawer runners and slots. Done well, though, I think they still have the aesthetic edge over metal slides.

Ellis Walentine, Host

Re: A couple other things...

Mark from Sacramento

>Since this small cabinet will have both vertical and horizontal dividers, are there any real benefits of using side hung drawers or does it just add complexity? I can see real advantages where a solid case (not too wide) can have full width drawers hung without having the added complexity of having to build the frame to support them but I'm having difficulty see any real advantage when the case has vertical dividers (which require some framework to support them). Sounds like I'm talking myself out of side hung drawers for this cabinet, huh?

Even more advantages

Ellis Walentine

>Depending on the wood the drawers are made of and their height, the side-hanging method keeps them running smoothly even when the height changes with relative humidity. With a traditional drawer, shrinkage loosens the vertical fit in the carcase, introducing more slop and dip when you open it. With a side-hung drawer, the shrinkage across the width of the runner is negligible.

Also, you can fine-tune the thickness of the runners so that they tighten up the side tolerances to the carcase. This reduces the drawer's tendency to rack from side to side, and it allows you to leave a carefully determined reveal all around the drawer.

The method I use to side-hang drawers is to make the runners so that they are a tight fit in the grooves when one thickness of wax paper is placed between them. Make the wax paper strips a couple inches wider than the grooves. Test fit the drawer&runner assembly in the case and plane whiskers off the runners until the assembly fits in the opening with just a tiny bit of clearance, actually interference. (What you're looking for is just slight and continuous contact between the runners and the inside of the carcase as you push the drawer home.

Next, brush some glue lightly on the faces of the runners and push the whole assembly into its final place. Adjust your vertical clearances to adjacent drawers with thin shims. After about 5 to 10 minutes, pull the drawer out and remove the wax paper. The runners should remain glued to the carcase. Drive a few screws through your pre-drilled and countersunk holes in the runners to apply the final clamping pressure and provide a mechanical backup for the installation. Scrape any glue squeeze-out from the junction between the runners and the case; if you used just a slight coat of glue, there shouldn't be much. With luck, your drawer should be tight, perfectly centered and smooth running in its opening.

To me, this beats making all those frame dividers.

Ellis Walentine

Re: There are some benefits

Glenn Madsen near San Francisco

>Assuming that the slides will hold the weight, and I didn't see where that was addressed. Metal slides typically add to the clearances that need to be accounted for in the cabinet. 1/2" per side, IIRC. For narrow, multiple drawers, that adds up. And those drawers don't normally hold as much really heavy stuff, either.

So it's a thought. There are always tradeoffs.