Using Blum Drawer Slides

When my armoire project was still in the planning stages, I knew that it would have drawers. I just hadn’t settled on the size of the drawers. As luck would have it I found some exceptionally nice looking cherry boards that were planed on both sides and still close to a full 4/4 thick and a little over 8″ wide. It didn’t take me long to decide to use those boards as the drawer fronts. They also solved my drawer sizing problems. I planned to make the drawer’s a full 8″ deep, thus using as much of the boards as possible.

Because I haven’t had enough experience making drawer runners, or slides, using all wood I decided to go with the Blum slides. Everything I read about them indicated they were top notch. The only drawback I came across was that the drawers had to be made to fairly rigourous specifications in order to work with the slides.

I really underestimated the meaning of ‘rigorous specifications.’

Often times, once an understanding is reached about how it works, things can be finessed to work into a design the way I’d like. This is most decidedly not the case with the Blum drawer slides. In fact, Blum slides more or less dictate everything about the sizing and construction of the drawer.

For instance, there are 2 basics ways to build a drawer. You can build the box and then attach a front to it or you can incorporate the front as part of the drawer box. In the case of Blum slides, they pretty clearly want you to build a box and then attach a drawer front. This limitation is imposed by the clips which attach to the bottom of the drawer and allow the drawer to run on the slides. As a result it’s likely I’ll have extra steps related to milling the backside of the drawer fronts.

Further, because the slides ride underneatch the drawer, the back side of the slide has a ‘spike’ that goes into the back side of the drawer box (The ‘spike’ prevents the drawer from tipping when pulling it out to full extension.). So the length of the slides also sets the length of the drawer. This is unfortunate in my case because the drawer cavity is much deeper than the slide I chose to get. (I chose those slides because they were the longest ones that would fit into the cavity.) Now, I believe I can set the drawer slides all the way to the back of the cavity, but it’s not clear how this might affect the stability of the drawer as it pulls out. Further, because of how the clips attach to the drawer bottom, I’ll need to attach a cleat on the underside of the drawer so that I can properly attach the clips. So I have extra work in the drawer construction.

Lastly, regarding the drawer depth. The Blum slides are large and mount on the undersidge of the drawer. The bottom mount has the nice effect of keeping the drawer slides invisible when pulling the drawer out. Unfortunately, as a result, I lose more of my drawer depth than on a conventional drawer slide. I was somewhat aware of this fact when I chose the Blum slides but, again, I thought I’d be able to finesse my way around it. I now see that I cannot and I’ll be losing close to 3/4″ of depth versus if I hadn’t gone with the Blum slides. This revelation was disappointing since I liked the idea that the drawers, as originally conceived when I found the wood for the fronts, were to be deeper than drawers on commercially available armoires. Now, the depth will be about the same.

The lesson I’ve taken from this is to make sure that the drawers are designed AROUND the use, or non-use, of the Blum drawer slides. For instance, knowing what I know now I would have made the entire unit DEEPER so as to accomodate the longer slide from Blum. Also, I would have designed the piece around the fact that the drawers would be built with a drawer front attached to the drawer box. I’ll lose an inch of so of drawer space length, but using some other design onsiderations (hidden stretchers behind the drawer fronts) I’d be able to maintain the depth of the drawer.

Live and learn.