Minimum cabinet depth for Blum under mount slides

[Dave Anthony]

I built a dresser which has an inside cabinet depth of 16". I have Blum 563H under mount slides which calls for a 15" drawer length and a minimum inside cabinet depth of 16 13/16", with the slide setback 1 1/32". If I place the slide in the cabinet I have 14/32" from the face of the cabinet to the side rail, and 30/32" clearance from the face frame to the bottom of the slide. The drawers will be inset with false fronts. I was thinking I could make the drawer shorter (15" -1 1/32" + 14/32" = 14 13/32") and rout a groove in the drawer sub face and the back of the drawer front and still use these slides. Will this work? The dresser's already been made, I have the slides and I don't want to loose the space of going to 12" drawers.

[Jerry Miner]

Yes, you can notch the front of the drawer box, and the false front to squeeze the hardware in. You can also cut a hole in the back of the cabinet for the hardware to extend out the back. The clips for the Blum 563 are typically screwed to the back of the drawer box front, but can be screwed to the back of the false front, or even up into the drawer bottom.

I would do a mock-up before I committed to final dimensions though.

[Peter Quinn]

I would do a mock up to verify, the 563H381B (15" drawer length) has a runner length of 15 9/16", so if the dimension from front of cabinet back to face frame of cabinet (what Blum calls "inside of cabinet depth in their spec sheet) is 16", then your runners and applied front may be occupying the same space. You can certainly notch the drawer boxes and attach the clips the drawer fronts, this makes alignment of inset faces more complicated, probably easier if you have the new style clips with the 3 way adjustment. You still may want to put the slides in place to dry fit the applied fronts relative to the drawer boxes to facilitate alignment.

[Tom M King]

Maybe you can attach them under the front of the drawer without using the normal clips some kind of way. It's not so bad if you have to remove a couple of screws underneath near the front sometime in the future. It seems like I did this once, but it's been too long ago for me to remember the details.