Advice please. Using roller bearings for my drawer slides.

[jeepdreamer]

So it's time to begin the slide out drawers in my XJ. I'm turning my 4 door into a permanent 2 seater so the drawers will go from the back of the seats to the rear hatch. So my main question is this:
Should I mount the bearings to the frame, the drawer, or will either be the same??

 

[rayra]

typically in the frame / box. leaves a cleaner look on the sides of the drawer and keeps them out of the rain / mud / dust, sorta.

 

[jeepdreamer]

Thanks rayra, that makes sense I suppose.
So next question involves the rail affixed to the drawer that goes between the bearing rows. Is there any better place for this? Top or bottom or middle of the drawer side??

 

[TrekboxX]

Doesn't really matter, but near the top will add rigidity to the drawer side possibly allowing you to get away with a thinner material.

 

[jeepdreamer]

Thanks TrekboxX. I picked up a sheet of 16ga steel for other jeep sheetmetal needs and think ill build out of it. I also grabbed 3 sticks of 16ga 1x1 tubing which will be for most of the frame. I guess ill play with the design and see how it goes.
Next thought is the drawer size. Obviously they are limited to the size if the jeep. But is there any advantage/ loss to making the drawers different widths? How do folks go about deciding what they need?

 

[Herbie]

Regarding where to mount the bearings, there are three additional considerations:

1) You will need to have two (or more) bearings tightly spaced near the end, so that you can mostly extend the drawer without it tipping out. This will be your highest load area. The amount of overlap between bearing and rail/tube is basically the same, so mounting to drawer or box won't matter.

2) You will probably want a "stop" to keep the drawer from extending beyond these end bearings. Mounting the bearings in the box means the "stop" will need to be on the drawer. Removing or bypassing the stop in order to remove the drawer might be more difficult. If you mount the bearings on the drawer and the rail on the box, the stop would be on the end of the box and more accessible with the drawer open. A small point in favor of bearings-on-drawer.

3) Alignment of the bearings will be fairly critical. If the drawer or box material more easily facilitates this alignment process, then there's an advantage to putting the bearings THERE (wherever it is). For example, if the box is wood but the drawer sides are steel, I think getting the precise bearing alignment would be easier in the steel. (Easier to scribe/punch, etc., and SUPER easy if you can have the sides drilled/machined on a table or CNC). One of this first guys who used this method put the bearings in the wood case/box, and used a lot of t-nuts to mount the bearings. I thought it was brilliant, but shuddered when I thought about how easy it would have been to have the soft wood pull even ONE of those holes out of alignment, potentially causing binding in the bearings...

 

[rayra]

Your 'stop has to be somewhere other than impinging on the bearings. Otherwise it hits the rearmost bearing first / too. If one is doing the roller-skate bearing design.

And that's easy to engineer by the way. Just make your drawer back full height and put a stop block / strip on the ceiling of the drawer space, as far in from the opening as you want the drawer to stay in. Depends on the weight load of the drawer I guess. I'm planning mine so that the reinforcement I put in the top for my locking paddle latches to engage will also serve as a stop. Just tip the empty drawer up to get the back end past the stop, and slide it in. But I'm not using rollers. So not really worried about a stop.

 

[plh]

Take a look at the Stanley Vidmar Industrial tool box construction for some ideas.

 

[Rezarf <><]

Pull out the gear you KNOW you want to keep in the rig. Measure the biggest item and let that set your interior drawer size for one of the drawers. FWIW, the bigger the drawer the more crap they can hold and the heavier they get... quick. I think 60/40 splits or similar on drawers look good and make sense. Have fun, sounds like a fun build.