Barrister Bookcase Door Slides

Tuck your barrister doors into the cabinet in one smooth motion with these easy-to-install slides. Unique design combines hinging action and sliding action into a simple roller slide, eliminating the clunky look of flipper-style hardware. Durable metal with brown epoxy coating and smooth-sliding nylon rollers. Includes mounting screws and detailed instructions. Sold in pairs. Note: allow 1/4'' gap at top of door for clearance.

Unique design allows smooth sliding with minimal bulk. Sold in pairs (four components) with mounting hardware. Both door member and cabinet member have rollers that double as hinging mechanisms. To remove the door, it must be able to swing inside the cabinet. Use only removeable catches/door stops. Minimum cabinet depth for 9" slide: 10" Minimum cabinet depth for 14-1/2" slide: 15-1/2" For use with 3/4” door thickness. The 9" slide works perfectly for our Barrister Bookcase Plan (52208).

Barrister Hardware Instructions

Customer Reviews and Photos for: Barrister Bookcase Door Slides Average Rating: (3.1) (9 customer reviews) Add your review...

1) Submitted by Paul Neff, from Berkeley, CA on 5/28/2009 Customer Rating: I had read reviews of the product before buying, so I was alert to the challenge of following the instructions. The product is high quality. The instructions are not. They need to be in 3-D, not plan & profile. As it turned out, the photos of the installed glides were more useful than the drawings. Also, pay attention to the reviewer who described installing the door on the tracks once everything's mounted.

2) Submitted by Keith Arnett, from Front Royal, VA on 4/30/2009 Customer Rating: With all due respect to some of the other reviewers of this product -- this is a fine product, and I've given it a Very Good rating. The materials are of good quality and well crafted, and the nylon rollers slide smoothly and silently. The metal portions were exceptionally well painted. I had this product out of the package, installed, and working in under an hour. Probably 15 minutes of that time was looking at the included drawing and manipulating the sliders and tracks until I had a clear idea of how everything fit together. If you aren't big on 3-dimensional thinking, it could be a challenge. The drawing is also available on the More Info tab for this product. I decided to cut and rabbet a dummy door from a piece of 3/4 scrap plywood, just to make sure. That took about 20 mins. I was retrofitting these into a piece of furniture owned by someone else, and I didn't want to mess up the door. But, everything went together as advertised. I didn't pay much attention to the dimensions in the drawing, I just mounted the tracks based on observation and some relative measurements. In this case, since I was retrofitting, I couldn't provide any relief in the existing cabinet for the rotation of the door, so instead I cut a 3/8" x 45 degree angle across the top front of the door, and that did the trick. One other tidbit: you will likely find, as I did, after you mount the sliders to the door, you can't fit them into the tracks. Solution: each slider is attached to the door with two screws. Simply unscrew the top screw on one of the sliders and pivot it slightly towards the center of the door. Now bring the door to its open/flipped up position, insert the opposite roller into the track, and then pivot the slider back into the opposite track. Re-insert the screw and you're done. Remove the door the same way. I was very satisfied with this product, and would use it again without hesitation.

3) Submitted by Ed Alexander, from Newington, CT on 11/28/2007 Customer Rating: The directions are a little difficult to figure out and they are not totally accurate with the dimensions. After a little work with a dummy piece I was able to make them work just fine. I like the way they act as a door support as well. I plan on using them in the future for projects.

4) Submitted by Stephen Tollefson, from Portland, OR on 3/31/2008 Customer Rating: The slides are of good quality--heavy metal with sturdy nylon rollers. Using them, however, presents some serious problems. Download the "instructions" (just a diagram, really) before you order. What comes with the slides is that same diagram, printed in miniature on the back of the staple-on label that closes the plastic bag the slides come in. No text. No template. No clues about door design or measurement. Just that poor diagram and some (maybe) dubious measurements. See if you make sense of it. You will need to a good deal of work with a dummy piece to make these work. You will be working with precise measurements (lots of 1/16s), tiny screws, and a slide design with no lateral stops on the rollers. The last issue is not a problem in use, but a real problem when trying fiddle with them. They rely on the door's stiffness to hold the rollers in the tracks. If you are fidgeting with them or using a narrow dummy piece, you will need to hold them in place yourself. To play around with these things, you will need to climb into your shelf unit with your perfect eyesight, good lighting, a precise ruler, and roughly 4 or 5 hands plus a few extra fingers to do the job. Note--from the diagram--that the slides are designed for a particular profile on the top shelf, with a lip coming down with a 45 degree bevel on its inside edge. That detail does a pretty good job of concealing everything, but steals about 1 additional inch of height from your shelf besides the 1 or so needed for the door and clearance. (Look at the instructions for Rockler's other barrister door slide model--part 18235--for other door/top shelf treatments. You can--as I naively assumed--put a 45 degree bevel on the top of your door and dispense with the upper-shelf lip, as is shown with 18235, but the top of the door-rabbet and the nylon wheel will show. I am still debating whether I'm going to keep these. The reviews on the other Rockler style (18235) are so poor, it doesn't appear to offer a clearly better alternative.

5) Submitted by Becky Buxton, from Boonville, IN on 10/29/2008 Customer Rating: I have to say first, that the fair rating was based entirely on the quality construction of the product. The instructions were extremely hard to follow. After much aggrevation and time, I returned them.

6) Submitted by Jerry L. Sokol, from Dunlap, CA on 11/10/2008 Customer Rating: This unit is well made but poorly designed and the instructions are very poor. I fooled around with this unit for a couple of hours and I couldn't get it to work properly. I finally turned the cabinet upside down and inserted the door then aligned the slides and everything works very well, but I lost the capability to remove the door without taking out the screws, which is really not much of a problem as I don't anticipate removing the door anyway. I think a better design might be to eliminate the crimp at the end of the slide, which is designed to keep the door from going too far in and then replace it by putting a small screw at the end. this way the door can be inserted from the back side before the screw is put in.

7) Submitted by Heather Kittleman, from Colorado Springs, CO on 6/3/2009 Customer Rating: Like other reviewers, I found this to be an excellent, well-made product - solid, painted well, works perfectly. If I ever have another project requiring barrister hinges, I will definitely buy these. Also like other reviewers, I found the instructions to not be very helpful, especially given my lack of wood working experience. But my dad, who does have experience, was able to figure out how to install the hinges without much trouble. Thanks to the reviewer who gave the tidbit about installing the removing the doors.

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