How to Repair a Wood Drawer Slide on a Vintage Dresser

If you ever owned a vintage dresser that had wobbly or difficult drawers due to a damaged or loose drawer slide, then you will enjoy today’s post!

One of the biggest challenges with vintage dressers are the drawers. With lots of use they wear out and while I have shared in the past how to install drawer slides on a vintage dresser using metal drawer slides, I wanted to also show how to preserve that original character of vintage drawer slides.

Vintage dressers usually have one of two kinds of drawer slides: side-mount or center-mount. Side mount isn’t really ‘mounted’ at all, but more of wood ‘guides’ on the sides of the inside of the dresser. These guides keep the drawer from wobbling back and forth too much, but the sides of the drawer carcass wear down or can swell over time and stick.

The other type of vintage drawer slide is the center-mount. Center mount drawer slides are a little more modern with a wooden drawer slide ‘channel’ on the underside of each drawer, and the actual slide is attached to a support piece on the inside of the dresser carcass. This type tends to last longer and also keeps the drawer from wobbling back and forth when you pull it out. This type is also quite easy to repair!

In this video I will share what you can do when a wood drawer slide is damaged or missing, how to make a new slide and attach it properly, and how to fix loose drawer slides.