Mastering Drawer Slides
Your guide to how to choose drawer slides for your next project.
Premium Heavy Duty Drawer Slides
Austin Hardware offers premium steel, aluminum, and stainless steel drawer slides for specialized vehicles including fire, rescue, emergency, cargo vans, maintenance trucks, and utility vehicles. Our extensive selection ranges from light duty 50 lbs. slides to extra heavy duty 500 lbs. with lock-in/out features, and even super heavy-duty industrial slides supporting up to 770 lbs. Enhance functionality by pairing your drawer slides with Austin's patented Front Drawer Release systems, providing one-handed solutions designed to secure your equipment.
A Closer Look: What makes a quality drawer slide?
Review these features to look for when searching for reliable slides.
High Quality Materials and Durability
Materials: Look for slides made with high density and high strength materials, such as our heavy duty steel, aluminum, and stainless steel options. The finishing should also be rust proof and anti-corrosive.
Ball Bearings: Generally, you’ll always want to opt for metal ball-bearing slides over plastic due to their durability. Ball-bearing slides are more durable than roller and plastic slides because the stainless-steel balls provide optimum support.
Drawer Slide Closing Features
Shock Absorption: Modern drawer slides often have shock absorbing capabilities that help minimize noise and damage caused by slamming drawers.
Push-to-open: Some drawer slides are also engineered to have push-to-open capability, which reduces the need for extra hardware like knobs and handles. This function can be helpful in applications such as medical supply storage and industrial workstations.
Self-Close: Self-close drawers are made to return the drawer into the cabinet softly and quietly when they are nudged in that direction. This increases ease of operation and decreases damage to the cabinet and drawer.
Soft-Close: These drawer slides add a dampening effect to the drawer closing that reduces the sound and damage that results from slamming them closed.
Easy Installation
Nobody wants to mess with parts that are unnecessarily tricky to install. Quality drawer slides will be user friendly and made for swift and painless installation.
Performance Tested
Nobody wants to mess with parts that are unnecessarily tricky to install. Quality drawer slides will be user friendly and made for swift and painless installation.
Drawer Slide Weight Classes: Breaking it Down
Light Duty - Up to 100 lbs
This weight class of drawer slides supports weights up to 100 lbs, making them ideal storage of lighter weight laboratory and medical equipment, tools, or for things like kitchen and office drawers.
Medium Duty - Up to 130 lbs
Supporting weights up to 130 lbs, these drawer slides can support tool cabinet drawers, storage systems, and other industrial uses within this weight range.
Heavy Duty - Up to 300 lbs
Heavy duty drawer slides are a popular choice when it comes to transportation applications. They work well forr storage systems in maintenance and work trucks, RVs, and other vehicles.
Extra Heavy Duty - Up to 500 lbs
These slides can support heavy weights in EMS vehicles, fire trucks, and service trucks.
They are also ideal for storage solutions in RVs, tiny homes, and solar manufacturing plants.
Super Heavy Duty - Up to 1100 lbs
Extra heavy duty drawer slides provide quality-assured high load capacity and are ideal for supporting big loads for applications such as:
• Emergency vehicles and transportation
• Enclosures for data storage and communications equipment
• Machinery and tool storage
• Industrial and manufacturing storage compartments
Choosing the Right Drawer Slides
We are here to help you pick the best drawer slides for your next project. This is an important task and can be determined based on the following factors.
Application
Different industry applications call for different properties. When choosing a drawer slide, it’s important to think about the different features you may benefit from or require. Consider whether you need:
• A quick-disconnect function
• Locking or non-locking
• Drawer extension of three-quarters, full, and over-travel
• Mounting: side-mount or undermount options
Weight of Drawer Contents
Austin Hardware’s drawer slides come in various load ratings. We carry drawer slides ranging from light-duty 50-lb rated slides to extra heavy duty which support weights up to 1,100 lbs.
We categorize our drawer slides into five weight classes: Light-, medium-, heavy-, extra heavy duty and super heavy duty load capacities.
Length
We offer lengths ranging from 12” to 60” to accommodate any application. Need help in choosing the correct length and extension for your project? Our team is here to help.
Compatibility with Drawer Release Product
Don’t forget to consider whether the slides will be compatible with the drawer release system needed for your project. Our 7650 series of drawer slides, for example, are an easy choice due to their durability and compatibility with our patented front drawer release (FDR) system. We are your one-stop-shop for all your drawer slides and release systems for projects like emergency vehicles, cargo vans, maintenance trucks, and utility vehicles.
Extensive Industry Uses
At Austin Hardware, we are your one-stop-shop for industrial grade steel drawer slides that you can trust for any project. The applications of our drawer slides are vast. We carry an extensive collection of these versatile parts to meet exacting standards for use in fire, rescue, and emergency vehicles, maintenance trucks, work trucks, utility vehicles, and many other applications.
• Industrial storage compartments
• Electrical and IT enclosures
• Mobile equipment
• Toolboxes
• Storage drawers for industrial fixtures and maintenance
• Lab testing equipment
• Warehousing
• Machinery access
• Manufacturing supply storage
• Commercial equipment
• Chemical storage
• Battery trays
• Portable electronics
• Medical equipment
• Data storage and communications equipment
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