Drawer Slides
We have begun the process of swapping out our old drawer slides for some new ones. Some of the old ones were getting pretty tired, even with a touch of grease in the tracks. Plus we wanted to explore the use of soft close slides to remove the “slam” effect and hopefully get ride of those hard to actuate spring catches.
The sides we are using have a soft close feature, and also have a pull to open feature. To open them takes about 10lbs of force in order to fully overcome the closing force. The open is not 10lbs and pop, its basically the opposite of the soft close, it releases fully after the drawer has been opened a couple of inches. We will test if this is enough to remove the current spring clips below the drawers, which in turn will allow us to add drawer pulls to some select ones, like in the kitchen. From an initial test drive they should do just fine but this summer will be the true test.
The slides are the same size width/height as the originals, with various lengths available to make sure they provide full extension for the given drawer depth. The mounting hole pattern is standard, however due to the soft open/close mechanism, the rear mounting holes are not available on the new slides. The front holes lined up, so you do not have to find the correct front/back location for the slide in the cabinet or on the drawer.
Of course its an RV which means nothing is just swap out / swap in! So far I have done the cabinets in the bathroom, kitchen and living room. Of those 3 only 1 stack did not require some cabinet work in order to provide a new back mounting point.
The issue is the cabinet skeletons have vertical members that the slides attach to, and since the rear mounting hole is not available on the new slide, you have to add a new vertical member to provide the new attachment point. One set of cabinets did have horizontal mounts, so that was a easy swap …. easy after you somehow figure out a way to get tools/hands inside those tight cabinets.
Video
Attached are a couple of videos showing the soft close feature. Quite a few more to go but its underway.
Source
The ones I am trying are the RV3M52, these are soft close with 10lbs of detent pulling force. They also have the RV3J01 series, these do not have the soft close feature, but just the detent force. With the RV3J01A you are supposed to be able to adjust the detent up to 15 lbs (according to the video) which may be the way to go for pot drawers etc.
I could not find these online when I did a search so I contacted the distributor Maxstone directly and they had no issues selling them directly. When I purchased them the prices were as follows: The 20” slides / $10.86 per pair, 16” slides / $9.95 per pair, 12” slides / $9.05 per pair.
