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Spent a full day trying to get a drawer slide to line up on a built-in
It was for a kitchen island in a house in Tacoma. The cabinet box was perfect, but the slide mounting plate was off by maybe 1/16 of an inch. I kept shimming, checking, and re-drilling for what felt like forever. The whole thing took me about 7 hours to finally get right. Anyone else ever get stuck on something that should have been a five-minute fix?
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fionanguyen20h ago
Honestly that kind of precision is overkill for a drawer slide... a 1/16 inch shim is basically nothing. Most of the time you can just tweak the drawer box itself a little bit or loosen the mounting screws to get some wiggle room. Spending seven hours on it sounds like a battle of wills with the hardware. Sometimes good enough is actually fine and it will still work perfectly smooth.
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oliviajenkins17h ago
My friend Dan spent a whole weekend trying to shim a drawer in his new kitchen. He was down to using bits of a soda can, like @fionanguyen said, fighting the hardware. Turns out the cabinet frame was built wrong from the factory, the whole side was off by almost a quarter inch. He had to rebuild the drawer box completely to match the bad space.
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jesse_coleman7819h ago
Man, @fionanguyen is totally right about the battle of wills. But what about when the cabinet itself is out of whack? I had a base cabinet where the side was bowed in the middle. No amount of drawer tweaking fixed the binding. I ended up planing the high spot on the drawer side, which felt crazy, but it was that or rehang the whole cabinet. When is "good enough" just ignoring a bigger problem with the install?
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