Last night, the sliding door (in front of my shelves of shortboxes of comics) popped off when I was sliding it open. I had noticed that it had gotten a bit “sticky” lately, but hadn’t really investigated.
And… this turned out to be the problem: Those “rails” at the bottom slid out. Like WTF.
And it turns out that they’re only fastened with double sided tape! Like… wat? I mean, there’s not supposed to be much pressure in an outwards direction, so you could see how that would work OK…
But look — this (aluminium, I guess) metal profile thing is so “hollowed out” that it only has these three narrow strips that make contact with the floor, anyway, so there isn’t that much surface to glue?
I was wondering whether I could drill a hole in the middle and fasten it with a screw, but:
Even the middle bit isn’t solid! Geez. So if I wanted to fasten it to the floor with a screw, I would have to drill either to the left and right of it, and then either use washers to fill in the gap (but that would be kinda precise; pretty fiddly) or cut a 2mm thick strip of wood and glue it in there, but…
In any case, the aluminium isn’t thick enough to do countersinking, so the screw head would stick up.
Which may not be a problem — there’s a couple millimetres worth of clearance.
But… eh…
I guess there was a reason the carpenter glued the thing in the first place — it’s designed to be glued, and there doesn’t really seem to be much of an option to do anything else.
But if we’re gluing, I can at least use better double-sided tape than was there originally.
So much red tape.
Don’t adjust your screen — your screen isn’t broken. That’s just a lot of tape.
There! Glued! It seems pretty solid to me — I can’t make it budge a nanometre.
All done!
But while messing around with this thing, I think I discovered what the actual problem here is. The carpenter who built this shelf for me put one of the feet of the shelf on top of nothing — the beam is about 4cm to the left (where the screw is), but where the foot is there’s just air.
So it’s sinking… slooowly. I mean, it’s lasted for about fifteen years, so that’s not bad, but I think I have to get somebody in to redo this thing, because it’s probably just going to get worse.
But not this week. Or month. It’s time to concentrate on procrastinating.
(What’s that I’m hearing? Is that a resounding crash? Nah.)