General Category > OT Knowledge
Kitchen unit handles
Canardly:
We have been looking at kitchen units with a view to refurbing at home, which is way overdue. Having now looked at a range of units, I am mighty perplexed to see that someone being asked to pay say, £12,000 for some chipboard with gloss laminate/foil applied, but lets not go there, will still have a kitchen where handles are secured by means of 2 screws through the chipboard, or possibly timber, from the inside of the unit/drawer. No reinforcement, flange, bar or washers at all to ease the point load. All of the unit handles we have seen were similarly treated from the top to the bottom of ranges and across all manufactures.
Much marketing effort was placed on metal drawer liners, metal shelf supports, soft close hinges, carrying capacity et al. Nothing on handle fixings. Genuinenly puzzled and now looking at integrated handles.
Canardly:
Whoops mispost can admin move to OT Knowledge please.
Kim:
Do they actually fail at the screw? IME it's usually the dowel-and-glue of the drawer front panel that fails. Probably with some encouragement from Anoia.
Related note: Why are pedal bin mechanisms so shit? Apart from the ones that cost about 5 times more than you'd reasonably want to pay for a bin (which might also be shit, but in less obvious ways). Our last one lasted all of about 6 months, before failing because it was using the waffer-thin sheet metal as a pivot and repeated use had torn a strip out of it. After failing to find anything better engineered, I bought a cheaper bin of the same design from Ikea and pop-riveted an extra strip of steel under the pedal. We'll see.
Canardly:
Oh yes.
Kim:
TBH, there are days when I wish that chipboard had never been invented.
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