Took me 3 hours to figure out why my drawer slides kept binding

I was building a set of kitchen drawers last week, all 3/4 inch maple plywood boxes. Got them all assembled and installed the undermount slides. First drawer worked fine. Second one stuck about halfway in. Thought it was the slide alignment, so I adjusted it a dozen times. Still binding. Then I checked the drawer box itself, and realized one side was 1/16 inch wider than the other. That tiny difference was enough to make the slide bind up. Ended up having to take the drawer apart and redo the box joints. I dovetail them on a jig, and I must have had the workpiece off by a hair. Total time wasted was a solid 3 hours. Has anyone else had a small measurement error snowball into a huge headache like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

spencer_coleman1mo ago

Oh man, I feel your pain. I once spent a whole afternoon chasing a binding drawer on a nightstand I was building. Turns out I had the slide bracket mounted 1/16 of an inch crooked and it took me longer than I want to admit to notice. I guess that's why they call it the "tolerance for error" except in my case the only tolerance was for my own dumb mistakes.

murphy.aaron1mo ago

@sage_green I started measuring three times and marking which side was which. Saved my butt more than once.

sage_green1mo agoTop Commenter

The struggle is real, @spencer_coleman. One time I built a bookshelf and spent three days trying to figure out why the middle shelf wouldn't sit flat. I finally realized I'd accidentally swapped two pieces of wood that were supposed to be different lengths by like a quarter inch. It was a total forehead slap moment. Ended up having to take half the thing apart and redo it from scratch. At least yours was just a bracket and not a full rebuild, right?