mechanical ⁽¹⁾

This had broken due to the weight of the items in the drawers causing the brown plastic runners to break. It's not that easy to find replacement runners, and in any case, they are likely to break again if they are used with this much weight - the unit is clearly designed for clothes, not paper files. It was clear that I needed to find a metal runner that could fit in the same slots to replace the plastic runners. Luckily, the slots in the drawers are a standard width and length: 17mm width and 350mm length, so these metal runners fit. They need securely fixing into the chipboard side panels, but an ordinary wood screw is not going to be able to take the weight. The pressure on the bits of chipboard just under the screws would be too much and the runners would fall off. On a similar IKEA drawer unit, the runners are fixed with M6.3 euro screws which have a distinctively wide thread and short fat design. But these runners have 5mm clearance holes which cannot take an M6.3 screw, so I found these M5 euro screws which work very well into a 4mm hole, drilled…