Re: Ok then............
Sgian Dubh
>I didn't make any criticism of your acquaintances' position Bill. I did say in my second response to you that it's often suggested that the material to go with the softer drawer side material (and slips if used) should be a harder material for the runners and kickers.
In the first instance I assumed your opening post was intended to generate academic discussion and that you'd dropped the first shoe where you stated the softer drawer side material recommendation and left it at that. It looked like you were fishing to see what responses you got before you dropped the other shoe with the information that says the runners and kickers should normally be a harder wood. I'm sorry I misunderstood the purpose of your opening post with its phrasing along the lines of, "Up for debate today....."
The softer/harder wood mix has logic and I've come across this sort of mix quite a bit. For example I've repaired cabinets with pine drawer sides/slips and english oak runners and kickers. Similarly I've seen mahogany sides/slips and ash, oak, sycamore or chestnut runners and kickers. There again I've worked on english oak sides/slips and english oak runners and kickers. Many a cabinet I've come across during repairs and restoration has been made with something hard like oak for the drawer sides/slips and soft pine for the runners and kickers with all the show wood of mahogany veneers and various inlays, cross-banding stringing and so on, which is what I call the 'fur coat and nae knickers' style of building, aka all flash and nae troosers, ha, ha.
The quality of both old and more recent furniture pieces I've worked on and repaired over the years has been all over the place from beautifully made highest quality to very shoddy.
What I am saying is that the end result of the soft/hard drawer sides/slips and runners/kickers mix is somewhat varied in my experience. It's very often the case I've found that a piece doesn't come in for repair until the movement of the drawers is so bad that they are virtually inoperable. Both the top edge of the drawer sides along with the bottom edge and slips, and the runners are often so badly worn that the drawer front has been catching on the front dividing rail for years and there's substantial damage to the bottom of the drawer front and to the front top corner of the divider along with veneer missing if it's a veneered piece. The top edge of the divider is also often notched at each corner where the bottom edge of the drawer side has worn it away. When drawers and the runners get this badly worn the drawer bottom itself is sometimes near enough worn through to its upper surface through having dropped out of the worn away grooves in the drawer front and the sides or slips that at one time held it. Coupled with this the cabinet itself is often shaky and on the verge of falling apart.
This sort of damage is extreme and repairs would be a lot simpler and cheaper if people brought their furniture in at an earlier stage of wear for maintenance, but it's my experience that they generally don't. Of the work of this type I've done on cabinets, drawers and drawer openings I'd hazard a guess that in 60-70% of cases the repair work required has been extreme. At this point in a cabinet and its drawer and drawer openings degeneration it really doesn't matter what materials were used in the original drawer sides/ slips and the runners/kickers because the whole lot is very badly worn requiring substantial wood replacement to everything, including the kickers which are generally the parts with the least wear.
But to finally get round to answering your question now that I know that it wasn't merely academic and relates to a specific project you are working on, the persimmon runners and kickers you propose mixed with a softer material such as poplar or pine for the drawer sides and slips would, on balance, be a good mix. You'll just have to hope whoever owns the cabinet perhaps 40 or 50 years from now will pop it into their local cabinet shop for some light tweaking of the drawer side bottom edges and the slips. If the cabinet is not repaired for perhaps 150 years the chances are it'll be in extreme delapidation as I described earlier.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, drawer side bottoms and their slips are thought of in the trade as wearing parts like brake pads in a car, and should be replaced on a regular basis. It's a shame most owners don't think of them the same way. Slainte.