How to Install Drawer Slides

how's it going guys as you can see I'm in the process of finishing up the construction on my J BIG's miter saw station and today I'm installing the drawer slides on the upper of cabinets and I figured it might be a good time to show you how I go about installing and show you how I'm overcoming a small little problem I had during the design of my cabinets so stick with me and I hope some of the tips I show you help you out alright so here's a quick shot of my version of the miter saw station I basically used a bunch of different ideas that guys have come up with that have built it already and put them together and made it my own I'm going to do another video when I'm done basically highlighting everything that I did here things that I like about it and things that I would change but like I said earlier today I'm installing the drawers on the upper cabinets and I have a little bit of an issue I'm gonna show you what that is now this cabinet the inner dimensions of it are 21 inches so when I built my drawers I should have built these at 20 inches and that's to accommodate two half-inch drawer slides which gives you a total of one inch so when these are both in here obviously one here and one over here those take up an inch of total space which is why you design you draw an inch smaller like I said than the inner dimensions I unfortunately built my drawers an inch and 1/8 smaller than the inner dimensions okay and what I found was that when I installed this Bank of drawers over here the drawers were binding they weren't closing smoothly I didn't like how it was how it was operating and what I started to do was cut down some shame because this isn't one of them the shim was actually a little bit smaller than this and I cut a 1/16 inch shim for each side of my draw to install behind the portion of the slide that mounts to the drawer and they worked really well but I didn't really like that I had to you know find a workaround like that for something that is brand-new I mean I just built this thing things like that bother me and I really wanted to come up with something a little bit better so I started doing some research and I found something that I think probably isn't really well known in terms of drawers slides and I don't think a lot of guys probably know about this I for one did it and it is definitely a great tip if you run into the same problem so here's the drawer slide obviously this is the portion of the slide that would mount to your cabinet frame all right so we're looking at the back side of the slide okay all these holes are where your screws would go and you can see it has this now you shaped cutout well I guess it could be a c-shape cut out the pin which way you look at it but nonetheless the cutout around this tab and that's there for a reason I never really noticed it I just installed a bunch of drawer slides I actually built that cabinet system over there a couple years back I didn't have any issues like I have with this but the function of these is to allow the straw slide to self-adjust away from the edge of your cabinet frame for any inconsistencies with your draw now if you come over here you could see they actually did that you can see the space that I have here now they basically planed to themselves out for the dimensions of my drop and you can see now that this draw itself operates very smoothly now the drawer slides I have to say are terrific I bought these from out water plastics the same place J got his and I highly recommend them I'm not sure if he got the soft close ones like I did they're a little bit more money but I really do like the function of these things it's a shot from the side how they work awesome no problems at all so you just have to pay attention to one thing if you need to use this function of the draw slides the reason why they didn't work initially when I install my drawers was because I started mounting some of the screws or installing some of the screws in the holes where these tabs aren't present so I install the screw in this hole and I think I probably used these holes back here as well or this one if you use those you basically overriding the function of these tabs if you need though for these draw slides to self adjust themselves you could only use the holes in these mounting tabs okay and I'll show you how I install these now it's a very similar method or actually it's almost the same as the one that Jay used when he installed his works really really well it kind of takes all the error out of installing them makes it easy and I'm going to show you another little trick that I do with those tabs to make this a little bit easier to install okay so just like Jay did I went ahead and cut three sets of these spacer blocks for the inside of my cabinet to install this dress okay I have three drawers obviously they have three different heights of draw slides alright these are the two for the upper drawer you got to install the drawers when you using these from the upper one down to the lower one okay you can't start from down here and work your way up so this is a two upper ones I just put these two other pieces in here just to hold them in place against the side of the cabinet to make it a little bit easier to install these okay what I go ahead to do is I remove the outer portion of the drawer slide a little bit easier to install before I go ahead and start mounting this in there when I go ahead and do is just push these tabs out ever so slightly and you can see on let's see if you can if I could show you this you see on the backside of that now how that protrudes away from the drawer slide a little bit now I've found that if you do that when you have to make up a greater distance like I have here that these work a lot better and a lot easier right from the start if you don't do this what you end up having to do is work the draw up back and forth a bunch of times and Bend and rack it a little bit you'll eventually get it to the point where it works and opens and closes smoothly but why go through that pain tania's process when you can just do this from the start so let me show you now how we install this you're basically going to install this the same way any other draw slot at this point okay what I like to do is obviously rested on these two blocks that I cut and I generally like to zoom in here I generally like to install the slide so it's slightly recessed behind the surface of the cabinet frame I know a lot of guys in school you know the lip of the lip of the drawer slide right here even with the front of your cabinet frame I don't know it's just personal preference I like recess thing a little bit I find that I have a little bit of wiggle room and play if something goes wrong all right I like to start with one of my screws in my drill like this this frees up my other hand and again make sure you use the holes in the tamps or around that cut out that c-shaped cut out that I showed you earlier make sure you don't go ahead and put a screw in that other hole there cuz you again you're gonna render those things useless okay so for these draw sides you have the front one and the back one these drawers are only 16 inches deep that's a little I really need to hold these in here when I'm putting the screw in I have one hand driving the drill obviously and I have my other hand pressing the drawer slide down onto the top of the spacer blocks and that basically ensures that perfectly perpendicular and level in the Kappa frame all right so this side was installed exactly the same as this side and what I'm gonna go ahead and do now is install the remaining two slides in this you install all the slides before you install any drawers alright so for the next slide we simply just take these two longer ones out put these smaller ones in and just like I did on the other one take these smaller ones and kind of put them in there to brace it against the side and then stole the next slide that's simple and then the bottom one obviously gets done the same way only difference is I'll be using these two blocks where for that one alright so as you guys can see I went ahead and got all six of the drawer slides installed I have two half-inch pieces of plywood acting as spaces now I designed all these drawers to have a half inch of space in between each one of them so what's the matter doing now is taking one of the drawers sliding it on to these spacers and now I can take the drawer slides and pull them out and install the screws into each side of them so what I usually do is I'll take a scrap piece of wood I'll hold it right on the face of the draw and then I'll just take my drawer slide and basically pull it so it's flush with this so I know that everything is even and same thing on the other side start with the first two screws and then we'll be able to pull the drawer out a little bit and get the next set of screws in all right and then Oh what's the matter doing is pulling the drawer out a little bit until we get to our next set of holes I don't know how good you can see that there you go I think you guys could see that down there this is real exciting stuff here isn't it hopefully you guys are getting something out of it okay yeah well you screws in that's just a matter of pushing the lower back and then hopefully everything works good and as you can see the drawer works perfect very easy thing to do by bending those tabs out you can overcome a lot of problems with your drawer design and like I said earlier you can probably get away with up to 3/16 of an inch of error with those tabs anything larger than that you're probably best off just installing some shims and calling it a day or rebuilding your drawers I know that's not something anyone ever wants to hear when you go through the trouble of building like 25 drawers like I've done here so real easy fix I guess just for the hell of it I'll install the other two drawers and show you how that's done real easy just basically taking the spacers putting them in place taking your next raw I actually got to get the drawer slides out of the cabinet a little bit to install them obviously screwdriver helps to get the pried loose oh you can do now is actually pull the bottom drawer out a little bit and that gives you plenty of room here to work now so much easier installing these drawer slides on the upper jaw is that it was on the lower jaws working down in your hands and knees never ready father I will tell you and I'm sure anyone that has built one of these so far if I don't build another draw for the next 20 years that is perfectly fine with me this was just a real repetitive exercise and doing all these things over and over and over again like I said earlier I think there's 25 or 26 drawers in my build here and it's just it's just the same thing over and over in the end I think it's worth it the storage that you get from one of these things is just absolutely awesome I think DIY Tyler said it best it's a it's a bunch of storage with a miter saw installed on it which I think I kind of like the draw storage better than the actual saw we're having a good place in my saw now get the idea so frame of the cabinet that's one thing you want to check that through john heiss has a really good video for adjusting drawer slides you want to make sure your drawer slides are installed absolutely perpendicular to the face frame a lot of a face frame on here but in my case is the outer edge of my cabinet carcass but if you have a face frame installed perpendicular to the face frame because if you don't you can wind up with one edge of the cabinet you know protruding out of the frame and the other edge will be flush that shows you that your drawer slide isn't a hundred percent parallel or perpendicular to the face frame okay so let's draw the same thing put these spaces in we could then pull this drawer out a little bit we're gonna take these drawer slides out again one thing's for sure you'll be an expert in installing drawers about this whole upper assembly to the lower one I'm waiting until I get everything done and installed so I want to give everything a light sanding in a coat of water-based polyurethane that's the only reason about this well that's about it guys as you can see all these drawers are installed now work absolutely awesome I can't wait to get this all finished and load these things up and finally be organized okay hopefully you like that tip with the tabs on the drawer slides if you have a similar problem as I did hopefully you don't and you design your drawers right from the get-go but hey things don't always go as planned right like I stated earlier I'm gonna do a follow-up video on my miter saw station when it is complete I will put a link in the description and on the screen when that is posted so you guys can check that out and you got any questions or comments on this video and the installation of the drawers leave them down below and I'll try to help you out as always thanks for watching

Channel: Fix It With Zim

Views: 759,170

Rating: 4.838563 out of 5

Keywords: drawer slide, wrong cabinet dimensions, wrong drawer size, cabinet drawers bind, miter saw station, diy, adjusting drawer slides, fix drawer slides, drawer slides, shop cabinets, shop organization, garage shop, garage organization, drawer slide tabs, shim drawer slides, shim drawers, installing drawer slides

Id: WovbATlrnQQ

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Tue May 22 2018