Not to beat a dead horse, but I just lost my first job due to the soft close shortage. I informed the customer that sc glides are impossible for me to get now till whenever. A bigger shop told them that they are easy for them to get, so they went with the bigger shop.

I am a small shop in the middle of nowhere Nebraska, but I go through Richelieu and some more local wholesalers, and I imagine I will get them in stock a lot later than the big guys. So, my question is this: Can the big shops really get them that much easier, if at all?

I have more kitchens on the books for this spring than I have ever had, but If I can't get sc glides than I may as well close my doors. My material delivery guy told me yesterday that there are no sc glides in the U.S. and Blum has quit making them, which is hard to believe. Please give me some info that you all have heard, I don't want to offer only euros or ball bearing. Thanks

I would buy as many as you can handle when they are available. We now have a just don't run out mentality.

Why would Blum stop making SC slides, this makes no sense. These guys could have or do have millions of guaranteed sales the world over, just gotta fill them??

Kevin, I agree that doesn't make sense. I was just noting what the driver said, and he talks to hundreds of shops. I don't believe it either, but nothing about this shortage makes sense at all.

Which leads me back to my original question whether this is affecting the big shops. I call my suppliers and they give me short answers that mean nothing, but apparently shops are still getting them, or they have huge stockpiles. It's almost time for the builders to break ground this spring and all I have to tell them is hopefully May, or so I have been told.

It's probably time to start looking for other brands of slides. I've had to use 3 different brands in last few months just so we could get projects out the door. Besides Blum, I also use Salice and Pro 600. Grass and Hettich are other alternatives.

All of the brands are out. Demand is way up worldwide and there's a shortage everywhere. Blum opened a new US factory sometime in the last year and it didn't make a dent in the supply chain. Place an order and get in line.

A big shop can just carry an inventory and not buy just in time. A forward thinking manager at the big shop can pretty well predict a yearly requirement at the end of each year. I'm sure they get better service on supply as well since they could be buying hundreds each month. In comparison a local appliance/ furniture store is now adding 100,000 square feet of warehouse space and making on time delivery their major selling point. Looks like that will work for woodworking shops too.

I'll tell you what is going on...Blum is taking care of their direct customers...big shops, and leaving all us small to medium sized guys that buy thru Richelieu, Wurth Baer, etc with our butts hanging out. Shame on Blum. Believe me if there was an alternative that i was comfortable with, I would switch in a hearbeat.

I have 3-400 sets on BO..some since last Sept. I do have 300 sets of drawer clips. Good job Blum.

I am in Central NJ.
I have used Grass ,Salice ,Blum, KV Muv,.Imports....
Last couple years been using Hettich 21" with clips - About $15.00 set.
For years I would order 30-50 sets a month ,1-2 Kitchens/houses worth.

4 Months ago Richelieu out, Wurth Baer was also out at the local branch,
I asked the rep to check other branches. He says Chicago had 300 but they did not want to do a transfer to the NJ Branch.
I said if I pay for the freight to ship direct to me would they sell them... 7 K's worth. Glad I did.
Getting down to my last 80+ sets. Got my orders in with both for another couple hundred sets.
It's money in the bank...

Jon hit the nail on the head. Now what are we going to do about it? I’ll build my own slides before I buy another Blum product after this.

I too am finished with Blum
This b/s will pass at some point...I have a long memory...an a nose that's been cut off enough times that it's comfortable with it

Everyone wanted to play pandemic, this is what the frick you get.

Don't worry, our little bubble being driven by free money, artificially low interest rates, and famine thinking will come to an end sooner than later.

My Blum rep says that they produce all slides a
that are sold in America in America. The machine that produces them runs non stop and as of this moment because of panic buying they are farther out on orders than they were a year ago. After all those years of JIT we are in for another year of not being able to give a hard date on job completion. I'm 75 so I will just go ahead and retire. The only reason I haven't is because there was so much work out there and nobody cared what it cost. Anybody interested in a complete one man shop in the DFW area? Lots of work and a few drawerslides left.

Jim, your Blum rep is full of crap. He's saying that US increase in demand has accounted for 8 month B.O's when prior to 2020 they were virtually non-existent? I may be stupid, but I am not stupid clear thru.

I don't know what is actually going on, but I've been trying to play nice with suppliers, but firmly stating that if they don't fix this crap, we're all going to go down. I can't sell cabinets if I don't have cabinets to sell. Shipping jobs without hardware is a box of nightmares and the war criminals onsite treat items floating around like it's stray garbage creating even more lost revenue and issues. Plus what is relatively easy to accomplish in a shop just becomes a disaster onsite. Forgotten items, a tool that is normally 10 paces away is now a 45 minute drive, etcetera.

The wholesaler that I purchase most of my hardware through thinks things will be improving. True or not. I do not know.

I/we are a four man shop. We don't hammer through that much of anything. Last year we spent a hair under $38k on hardware, (including shop supplies like glue and abrasives), so maybe I'm in a sweet spot where my quantities are small enough I can squeak through. I use a spreadsheet track and keep orders organized. So far as of today, (02.08.22), we're at just over $5k in orders, so our pace is up with 39/365 days, or 11% of the year completed. Whereas last year, we would've been approximately $3800 at this time of year. Could be timing of orders swaying that potentially flawed logic as well.

I used to carry some inventory on slides. If I needed 20 sets, depending on what was already on hand, I'd usually order 40-50 pair. If I needed 50, I'd order 90 or better because of the price break at that quantity.
Today if I need 23 sets of a particular size, I order 24 sets. I just round up to the nearest box. Essentially the only slides we have sitting here, are spoken for with jobs that are at the finisher, in some stage of production, or are in the que. So far, that methodology has been working and I have not been waiting or waiting much, or shipping jobs sans hardware. I'm ordering slides at the very beginning of projects to allow ample time and trying to avoid issues.

My concern is some are thinking they are real smart, and by cleverly hoovering up all the slides, that somehow they will be immune to crap going completely sideways on them. When they aren't, they are just delaying the inevitable by a few weeks or months at best. To me, this line of thinking of not working with suppliers is what is creating a good portion of the problem we are facing.

Now, to be a complete hypocrite, if I would've had a lick of sense, March of 2020 I would've ordered Pallets of slide sizes, and pallets of hinges long before the supply issues would've been a thing. It would've created some financial stress, but nothing fatal. It certainly would've kept a few grey hairs out of my scalp. My little operation, I would've carried through, and stolen some work from others in the process. But I'm not a dick, I didn't contribute to the problem and I didn't do that. Now it's too late to have that mentality anyways, and as I said, it would've just delayed the inevitable, even going drastic and ordering more than a years worth of inventory at a time.

You do you. But unless you're somebody real major in this game and have some serious purchasing clout, you are not going to save your client list, your business, or your sanity by screwing the rest of us over. Go wipe that BS with the extra toilet paper you bought.

Jon, what does your Blum rep say? I would be interested.

We are experiencing this to the extreme. I have had soft close inset hinges on back order for 3-4 months. I currently cannot hang an inset door, and I've got 3 jobs of inset cabinetry coming up. Go figure. Drawer guides I've had problems with 21's and the off sizes like 15's and 12's .. not so much on 18's for whatever reason..

My Blum guy told me their factories only produce one thing at a time and they switch over their tooling to produce something else and that's all they do until they switch to some other product, and they had no intention of modifying or ramping up their production. Sounds a little odd to me but hey, what do I know? I'm just the carpenter.

we have switched more than once to chinese imports and quite honestly are paying way less than the blum slides we were using for years and the quality is excellent. we had switched to hettich a few years ago and the thick nylon front clips never broke like the plastic blum ones did. when my local supplier couldnt get anymore, i switched to the chinese slides asnd have not looked back. the one i am buying has great front clips and since we have a double line boring machine and use the blum drawr front adjusters, we never need to use the front clip adjustments although they are there.
i bought several hundred pair and just placed another order for another few hundred. price went from 13.50 to 16.50, but atleast i could get them.
my problem now is getting push to open undermount slides.
no one has them and my local grass supplier did, but was short of the pusdh to open pistons which work with the soft close but you have to chnge them out. house is still not ready for the cabinets due to construction delays, but i have been waiting three months for the pistons:)