There are various reasons that your kitchen drawer can get stuck. Sometimes it’s an issue of lack of oiling, ball jamming, different slide mechanics issues, bloated wood because of seepage or you have an overfilled drawer.
In this post, we’ll be covering each of the problems and try to solve the issue you’re having with practical solutions that you can implement.
You can go to the specific section based on the issue you’re facing.
Or, if you don’t know the reason why your drawer got stuck read this post start to finish to get any idea what might be your problem.
Side note: This article presents general advice. As there are a lot of different types of kitchen drawers available in the market. The tips showcased in this article will cover most of them.
But generally, the two most common types of kitchen drawers are:
- Ball-bearing
very easy to disconnect. Simply you need to pull the level from one side and do the opposite on another level to loosen it. Then you can detach the drawer for further fixation.
- Roller
don’t have any levels attached to them but, just a wheel roller. So you just have to slide towards yourself and do an upward or downward motion whatever deems fit to you in the present moment and it’ll easily dislocate.
Lack Of Oiling
Generally, you need to keep your drawer slides lubricated from the start to the end. This way you’ll rarely get any issues. Consider oil as the main source of food to the slides.
As you’re already facing this issue, you can do a quick oiling hack to see if it works for you.
Make use of machine oil which usually has a pointed nozzle on top so you can spill the oil evenly in narrowed spaces.
The best machine oil you can get for this purpose is available here.
Try to take the drawer out as far as you can and do the oiling on both ends covering all the visible space you can see.
After that, push and pull multiple times. This practice will equally divide the oil throughout the slide and also spread in sections where you can’t reach. Try to remove the drawer and see if comes out easily?
Ball Bearing Issue And Slide Mechanism
Keeping the matter of oiling on the side we also have different issues with the slides as well:
- Etching.
- Misalignment
- Wear, pitting and bruising
- Excessive preload or overload
- Fatigue spalling
- Excessive end play
- Wear, abrasive contamination
- Burn
- Impact damage
- False brinelling
- Improper fitting
- Cage damage and so on…
Bloated Drawer
Usually, when the drawer is quite close to the sink it can naturally attract water which can cause it to bloat.
This bloat will further make problems when you try to open it and damage the drawer further.
Bloating makes withdrawing items in or out of the drawer becomes difficult.
Overfilled Drawer
This is not an unusual issue when you put something inside the drawer which can unpack itself and become bigger as soon as you close the drawer.
Also, this usually happens when you put something inside the kitchen drawer forcefully.
We recommend having enough gap on top so this never happens again.
Things like towel, egg beater on top of something that’s already presented in the drawer, etc.
Moreover, this problem can also occur due to spongy bottom of the drawer i.e. when you try to put something inside it, it seems like there’s enough space but, as soon as you close the drawer it becomes jammed.
Solution: You might have to put force on the items which are causing the issue. Or you have to pull and push multiple times to either dislocate the item or let it fall.
Conclusion
Here you have it. Getting a kitchen drawer out requires knowledge of what really happened to your drawer before you begin solving.
You need to dig down deep into the actual cause and then act accordingly.
Sometimes you might also want to get the drawer out because of the mice that may have messed in it.
