Repair Note: A Drawer That Rocks, and the Five Places That Cause It

Measure the runner wear, do not eyeball it

Feeler gauges, not fingers. Pull the drawer out, and with the drawer supported, work a feeler gauge between the top of the runner and the drawer side at the front, in the middle and at the back.

On this chest the front was 0.1 mm, the middle 0.3 mm and the back 0.9 mm. That gradient — tight at the front, slack at the back — is the signature of runner wear, because the runner wears where the drawer rubs, and a drawer rubs hardest at the back where the leverage is greatest.

A uniform gap of 0.2 mm all along is not wear. It is clearance, and it is supposed to be there.

Check the drawer side for the same wear pattern

Turn the drawer over and look at the bottom edge of each side. A worn drawer side shows a polished band along the bottom edge, with the timber compressed and slightly burnished.

If the drawer side is worn more than the runner, replacing the runner is not the whole fix; the drawer will still sit low on the other side. Both surfaces wear, and the fast fix — a strip on the runner only — usually buys a couple of years and then the drawer starts rocking again on the side that was not seen to.

Clean both surfaces back to bare wood

Alcohol on a rag, then 0000 steel wool along the runner and along the drawer's bottom edge. Old furniture accumulates a century of wax, graphite, tallow and grit on these surfaces and almost none of it is lubricant any more. A drawer that has been "lubricated" with candle wax every few years is usually a drawer with a millimetre of accreted wax in the runner trench.

This step alone closed the gap on this chest from 0.9 mm at the back to 0.6 mm. A third of the problem was dirt.

Add a wear strip to the runner, glued not nailed

A strip of hard maple, 25 mm wide and 6 mm thick, planed down until the drawer runs with 0.2 mm of clearance at all three measurement points. Glued with hide glue and clamped, not nailed — a nail into a 150-year-old runner will split it, and the strip has to be replaceable again in 50 years.

Plane the strip, not the drawer. If the clearance is still wrong after the strip, take it off, plane it thinner, and refit. Removing material from the drawer side is the one irreversible mistake in this job.

Wax the strip with paraffin, not candle wax on a stick

Paraffin block rubbed along the new strip and along the drawer's bottom edge, then buffed with a cloth. Paraffin is harder than beeswax and does not collect grit the way a soft wax does.

Candle wax rubbed on a runner is the single most common cause of a drawer that binds in summer. Soft wax collects dust, the dust grinds into the wax, and by August you have a lapping compound in the runner.

Check the stop, which is usually the next thing to fail

With the drawer running properly, check that it stops where it should. A drawer with no stop gets pushed in hard, the front slaps the case, and within a few years the dovetails at the front corners start to open.

If the original stop is gone — and on a chest of this age it usually is — a small block glued behind the back rail, or a screw with a collar in the case side, will do the job without altering anything visible.