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Wooden drawer slides

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Whenever I build something with drawers, never buy metal drawer slides, but make the drawer slides as an integral part of the drawer, and out of wood. It just wouldn't be right to use metal drawer slides, and for many of the... See more » Whenever I build something with drawers, never buy metal drawer slides, but make the drawer slides as an integral part of the drawer, and out of wood. It just wouldn't be right to use metal drawer slides, and for many of the things I build, metal drawer slides would not even be suitable. Metal drawer slides are often not very strong, expensive, and also make it harder to take the drawer out of the cabinet. This article summarizes different drawer designs I have, and my experiences with these types of drawers. I'm hoping this will help you decide which styles of drawers to make when you do make some. The best sliding and most durable drawer slides are of course if you have hardwood sliding on hardwood. Preferably with a very dense and close-grained hardwood such as maple. My dad often makes drawers like that on furniture he builds. I have personally never used this approach though - I don't have my own source of hardwood, and its too expensive to buy just to make drawers. To economize on the use of hardwood, I have often made the drawers with a hardwood rail sticking out the side, and made that slide in a hardwood channel in the piece of furniture. I used this approach for a drawer in a TV table. With the drawer only filling part of the space underneath the table, the channel just spanned from the front to the back for the drawers to slide in. I also used this approach in a drawer chest, shown at left. The drawers go right to the edge of the cabinet, so it was more expedient and space efficient to just attach pieces of hardwood to the inside sides of the cabinet. I just used pieces of scrap hardwood I had lying around, which is why the pieces of wood have odd shapes to them Each drawer has a bottom guide, and a top guide. The top guide is there to keep the back of the drawer from tipping out if its pulled out more than half way and let go. A refinement was to make the top rail a little bit shorter on the front. That way, if the drawer is nearly out, rather than have a crazy amount of leverage on the rails and potentially damage things, it will simply fall out. It also makes the drawer easier to insert back in the cabinet if it was taken out, as the back of it just needs to be placed on the bottom rails, and pushed in, rather than aligning it precisely first. I originally made this drawer chest to slide under a workbench in the basement. But as a nice touch, I spent $20 for quarter inch thick pieces of oak that I glued to the front of the drawer. The whole thing ended up looking so nice, it's now under a desk in my new place. A variation of this is to put the slides towards the bottom. I did this with another box of drawers, which for a while, served as desk drawers, as seen at left. For these drawers, I made the slides higher, but narrower. With the extra width of the hardwood slides, gluing them just to the sides of the drawer was quite sufficient. The slides actually are the bottommost part of the drawer, and to some extent help hold the bottom in place. Being fairly narrow, they also make this drawer case more space efficient. They do look slightly odd out of the cabinet though, but overall, it's a very practical combination. I used odd shaped pieces of scrap wood for the guide rails inside the cabinet, hence the odd shapes in the image above right. I had built that drawer cabinet for the basement originally. The plywood case was reclaimed plywood. On a whim, I put bits of oak on the drawer fronts, and the whole thing ended up looking too good for the basement. I combined it with a table to form a 'desk' - see shot earlier. The table part also makes a decent dining table if the tabletop is not mounted off centre. Its like a furniture wardrobe remix! For lighter drawers, I have often used hardwood just for the rails. This doesn't slide quite as well as hardwood on hardwood, but it has done ok so far, and is easier to build and very much economizes on the expensive hardwood. I used this approach for my disassemble-able desk drawers. With the drawers sliding on maple rails, I left the whole drawer section open, with the See less »

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Wooden drawer slides

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