Flutterby™! : Customer service 2008-08-25 21:22:29.733738+00

Customer service

2008-08-25 21:22:29.733738+00 by Dan Lyke 10 comments

Charlene and I have been looking at drawer slides, we've got a few favorites, but two of our cabinets are going to be very shallow, which limits our options somewhat. I posted a query about drawer slides to LumberJocks, specifically asking about drawer depth to width and racking with various slides, and got a response from someone from Accuride. I've exchanged email with him, the short version is that I'm just a hobbyist building one small kitchen, I expect we'll buy about $2k in slides, and Accuride just went from an also-ran to a front-runner.

I'll see how some of those slides feel, but there'll be some test cabinetry along shortly...

Last time I was in China I spent some time looking at the newest Chinese kitchens. The drawer slides you push to get open look nice but don't work as well as I thought they should. They had some slides which allowed you to forcefully close the drawer and it would close the drawer but at the last minute the speed of closing slowed down so it gently landed. very nice.

We have slides in all the drawers in our kitchen (built in 2004), including the pull-out drawers for things like pots-and-pans and mixing bowls which are behind standard doors. For all of them, you give them just a little touch to get them on their way (or slam 'em inward!), and they grab part-way closed and eeeeeease the drawer into place. I am totally happy with them. Should I get in there with a flashlight and see what make they are?

Diane, I'd love it if you did! My guess is that they're Blum Tandem plus Blumotion, but I just discovered that Accuride's doing a version now that they think is competitive (my rave above is from email exchanged about my exact needs with their rep), and there's a variant from Futaba and Knape & Vogt, including one "Chinese knock-off" that a local distributor who'd prefer not to be mentioned to protect their relationship with Blum carries (might be "GS-Slide").

Ziffle, thanks for the heads-up on the "push to open", that's one of the things we think we'd like but have heard doesn't last as long as you'd hope. There are some horrendously expensive electromechanical solutions, Blum's Servo-Drive, for instance, but I've yet to see those in person.

The closing behavior is what Diane's got. I don't know if we can get that on our shallow drawers (probably about 9" deep), but we want it on our regular drawers, and we think on our doors, too.

Dan, I did the "crawl under the drawers with a flashlight" action tonight and you are correct, we have the Blum Tandem plus Blumotion. My experience is that it works as well for the heavy pan drawer pull-outs as it does for the hotpad drawer next to the stove. While I was down there, I checked on the little damper thingies that are on every cabinet in the place where the doors close and found they are SALICE SMOVE "door-decelerators". I don't know if you'll be looking for those sorts of things also, but we like 'em a lot. Keeps things a LOT more quiet around the kitchen.

Awesome, Diane, thanks! Yes, we want the cabinet damper thingies (although that does mean we need pulls and not "push to open" on the cabinet doors), knowing that those have served you well and survived for 4 years is a good data point.

Kitchen cabinet and drawer hardware is really a major cost in redoing a kitchen. But you are putting so much into your cabinets that quality hardware will add usability and long term service life. Because your work is being so well done, have you considered adding some of the better under drawer invisible slides? They add a "fine furniture" dimension that would compliment your fine woodworking.

m, the Blum slides we have are under-drawer invisibles (hence my need to crawl under the drawers with a flashlight to figure out their make).

m, yeah, with the shallow drawers we may not have the option of undermount, but with the deeper drawers (the 24" and 20" deep cabinets) that's my plan. Of course the undermount slides sometimes have lower weight tolerances, and we're planning on at least two fairly big and heavy drawers (pots and pans next to the stove), so those two may have to have side mount slides.

Dan, our big pots-and-pans drawer next to the stove has the heavy-duty Blum undermount slides also: no side mounts at all. (Ditto the pull-out drawer that stores the cast-iron wok, the turkey pan, all my Pyrex bakeware, and my mixing bowls (one drawer). Still slides smoothly, grabs-and-closes with ease, no sagging or other problems at all.)