Drawer slides best for the buck

[Cabinet Monkey]

I'm kinda considering not getting soft/self close as the pessimist in me says it's just something to break. The drawer slide should still work after that point.
It's a balance between the added expense of soft/self close knowing it may very well break sooner or later ... and my wife's annoying habit of not closing drawers all the way lol

IMHO - This is why choosing a quality slide is more important than a few bucks.  Blum and Accuride are market leaders because they deliver quality and longevity year in and year out for half a century.  If their stuff broke after a few years , word would get around and the interweb would be full of stories and advice about why to avoid them because they ain’t worth the price. 



FWIW - the soft close is something that can break - Grass’s is notorious for crapping out after 3-4 years, but the drawers still work and are “self closing” independently of the “soft” feature.  Pretty certain Blum invented the soft close and I have not had or heard of a failure in two plus decades they’ve been around. I’m sure there have been failures but I would not lose any sleep over worrying about whether Blum slides were gonna fail on me.

Willing to bet Blum would comp you a new pair if you went through the hassle of contacting them if you did have a failure. 

BillN - Fulterer makes quality stuff too, they just don’t have the distribution networks , training/support  or marketing that the Euro. Manuf. do.

[Bob Vaughan]

The Accuride 3800 series has been my long time favorite.  They are quiet compared to the raspy rumble of cheaper look-alike slides.

Assume a drawer box opening is going to be 4" high x 22" x 22".
That's 1936 cubic inches.  Side guides takes that down to 1848 cubic inches.  Bottom guides leaves 1452 cubic inches.  To me, that's an unacceptable loss of storage space.

[DogwoodTales]

CM- I anticipated that response from you 
 - and I agree. I've just been hoping that maybe I could spare a few bucks on a lesser known brand.
I guess I'll just bite it and splurge on the drawer slides.

Bob - being a bean counter by trade, I've been considering the difference in the storage space by cubic inches as well. The difference in cubic inches between side and under mount in your example, which is close to the top drawer sizes in my kitchen plans, is less than 400 CI. However, I don't store cubes, so it's a matter of if losing 1" in height still works for our anticipated needs over the loss of about 1" in width - that and other anticipated uses of a given drawer or pull-out shelf. I can probably resize the drawers to optimize the depth to our needs.

This is not set in stone yet, but I think I'll probably go with Blum undermount for the drawers, but side mount for the pull out shelves which will be carrying more weight.

thanks to all!

[Cabinet Monkey]

CM- I anticipated that response from you 
 - and I agree. I've just been hoping that maybe I could spare a few bucks on a lesser known brand.
I guess I'll just bite it and splurge on the drawer slides.

Bob - being a bean counter by trade, I've been considering the difference in the storage space by cubic inches as well. The difference in cubic inches between side and under mount in your example, which is close to the top drawer sizes in my kitchen plans, is less than 400 CI. However, I don't store cubes, so it's a matter of if losing 1" in height still works for our anticipated needs over the loss of about 1" in width - that and other anticipated uses of a given drawer or pull-out shelf. I can probably resize the drawers to optimize the depth to our needs.

This is not set in stone yet, but I think I'll probably go with Blum undermount for the drawers, but side mount for the pull out shelves which will be carrying more weight.

thanks to all!

Well, you can certainly save some money on lesser brands.  But, that doesn’t necessarily make them a better “value”.   Everyone has their own measure of that though. 

I’m with you on the cubic storage.  I don’t store cubes either and I don’t miss the xtra (if any) space a side mount may provide.  I can tell you that every Accuride slide I have or have had needs to be cleaned every so often because it gets exposed to crap that inevitably finds it’s way into and on top of them. 

No thanks…….. except in outdoor conditions where stainless steel is needed and the cleaning / maint.  is the cost of doing business to keep rust at bay. Or ,as previously mentioned where an exorbitant amount of weight or cantilever needs to be part of the design mandate , like tool boxes or full sized rollout trays in the beds of trucks/SUV’s.