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Fix gently closing drawers

Be it in your kitchen or wardrobe, it is not uncommon to have some fancy gentle closing drawers; those idyllic pieces of furniture allow you to push softly on them and proceed to close themselves in a delicate fashion. Those drawers are the royalty of furniture, elegant, discrete, soft and chivalrous, even romantic. I bet all other pieces of furniture are jealous of their behaviour and that female drawers dream about being one day closed like them.

But there is always one little fucker, the drawer that has gone astray, the drunk piece of shit that instead of closing suavely slams itself as if you owned him money. At the beginning it was smooth like butter, but after a bit too much weight over a bit too much time or maybe a few too hard pushes it gives up and takes its revenge by closing even harsher than a normal drawer would.

All this drawer is demanding is a bit of attention, to get cared for, and once this is done it will behave as the gentleman it was one day. The solution is pretty straightforward and can be broken down into a few steps (which can vary slightly depending on the mechanism of the drawer, but those shouldn’t be very dissimilar)

  1. Take the drawer out of the railing so that the screws that hold the railing to the structure are exposed. With the drawer removed you can determine if both railings are the problem by pushing each one independently (both should be broken, otherwise the drawer should slam)
  2. Unscrew the railing out of the structure so that you get access to the piston that forbids the drawer from slamming

exposed_piston

That dark gray thing is the root of all evil
  1. Take out the piston (it is not necessary to dismount anything, most of the times you can just push it out
  2. Search the piston for a lid-like piece and remove it (any flat screwdriver or knife should be enough)

closed_piston

This is a closed piston

opened_piston

This is the same piston with the lid removed

leaning_piston

This is the same piston seen from a different angle. Cool, huh?
  1. Fill the inside of the piston with oil (it could be any liquid you had available, but oil lubricates as you open and close the drawer). In my case I used motorbike engine oil because I had it at hand, but any type will do. Fill it until full but with not overflow (or fill it a bit too much and let it spill all over you when you ensemble it; it’s messier but funnier)
  2. Close the lid and mount everything back, the drawer should now have recovered its original personality

PS. You might wonder

Why not just change the piston?

To what I answer

The capitalist rats that manufacture the drawers decided it was not profitable to let you fix your stuff and won’t sell a single piston but instead the whole mechanism, costing you much more and being left with an additional perfectly working mechanism. Also it feels great to fix things with minimal resources