Modular Drawer Slide System

The brief was simple to state and difficult to satisfy: a slide mechanism that a small workshop could produce in batches of fifty without specialized tooling, and that an end user could service with a single hex key.

The mechanism

Three printed prototypes later, the working geometry turned out to be the simplest one — a captured glide block riding inside a standard aluminum extrusion channel.

// Soft-close damping curve, sampled at 100Hz
float dampingForce(float velocity) {
  const float K = 0.42f;
  return -K * velocity * fabsf(velocity);
}

The Arduino rig above was only for bench testing — the production part has no electronics at all, which was rather the point.