Pantry repairs…March 2022
See further below for an update in July 2025
In this ’02 Winnebago Journey, what is used as the pantry are two 59″ tall X 20″ deep X 8″ wide pull out drawers I guess you’d call them. They have adjustable shelves and it’s where you’d store most of your food items typically stored in a ‘pantry’. Of course pantries are rather old fashioned now so very often when you tour a new house, you won’t find a separate pantry. In an RV, of course space is a main consideration and this RV has two of these large drawers, and I’m lucky to have them so close to the food preparation area. One of them is removed if the RV was ordered with a double wide refer, which in my opinion would make it a bit crowded wherever the owner would chose to place their food items. So I’m glad I have them.
Anyway, over the last few months I’ve found that the drawers have gotten much harder to open, and much harder to close. And then in the last few weeks, I’ve had a mouse problem and I suspected there was a mouse house behind one of the drawers. So that was the inducement for me to pull out the pantry drawers and fiddle with them. Both to make them slide easier on the hanging tracks that support them, but also to check for mouse nests behind. Here’s what one of them looks like after emptying out the shelves and pulling it out to it’s normal extent.
There are a couple tabs that need to be depressed on the brackets top and bottom in order to remove the drawers completely…the drawers hang onto these metal brackets and they have bunches of ball bearings on the slider parts. And I found that many of the ball bearings fell out of the assembly when I removed the drawer. I was able to find most of them but several had been lost months or years ago and were nowhere to be found.
While the cabinet was removed, I didn’t find any evidence that a mouse built a house under or behind the drawers. There was a single wide crack that a mouse could navigate in the lower back of the cabinet so I stuffed crumpled aluminum foil in it to hold them back a bit. Should have used steel wool but don’t have any just now.
And here’s a close up of the brackets showing the ball bearings after I’d found most and put them back into their appropriate metal holders.
So I’m short about 5 or so balls and I’ll get them at a hardware store when I need to. Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time bending the little metal tabs so they’d hold onto the balls that are left and yet not jamb up the slider part supporting the drawer.
Here you can see where I stuffed the aluminum foil in the crack hoping that would deter any mouse.
And here’s a shot of the drawer where I’ve removed one of the brackets so I can figure out why it won’t push in like I expect. That’s how I discovered that many of the little ball bearing holders had gotten bent over the years making it hard to push or pull as it was trying to jamb things up in there. Got them all straightened out so the bracket would slide in and out smoothly so then I reattached it to the drawer and reinstalled the drawer in the cabinet.
And after using lithium lube and getting the ball bearing holders all straight, the drawers operate very smoothly. Just what I need. Now I have to worry about them dancing open while traveling.
So there ya go, how to work on the pantry drawers when they become stiff. Note that many hardware stores have ball bearings of different sizes so the ones that you might have missing can be replaced. What I found in my area is that the DoItBest hardware did NOT have ball bearings so I had to drive 12 miles to an Ace Hardware to find stock. I took a set of calipers and one of the bearings with me to compare to their stock and that was helpful to get the right size. Another thing that should be done is that the small metal tabs that sort of hold the ball bearings in place need to be straightened out as in my case, they’d gotten smooshed somehow by the mechanism sliding back and forth. Mostly in places where the ball bearings had fallen out. So like 8 of them. So if your drawers get harder and harder to pull open or push closed, that’s likely the cause because straightening them back out, putting the remaining ball bearings back in place fixed the difficult closure symptom. The good news is that they are soft metal so they can be bent back into place easily without breaking off. The bad news in one case in my drawers is that in one tab the hole that holds the ball bearing got rounded out somehow and the ball won’t stay in the right place…so I just left it empty. No ball bearing there now.
And that’s what I did to improve operation of the pantry drawers. They slide much smoother now. No struggling to get them open or to close them. I did try to find replacement brackets but like I mentioned above, they’re no longer available, so repair was necessary.
I did have to repeat this ball bearing replacement several times because it’s so difficult to get the drawer aligned just right when reinstalling it. Get it cocked just a bit off and it will bend the tabs that hold the balls and they fall out. Having the extra balls on hand was necessary and helpful.
So here’s how it looks now, and the drawers glide smoothly again. It was 6 years of usage that somehow caused the damage and the drawers becoming ‘tight’ over time with missing ball bearings. What worries me is that the slide mechanisms are shown as no longer available at Winnebago and on line as a generic so if they go bad again, what will I do then? Maybe call a salvage yard and ask for a set from one of their damaged RV’s? I dunno at this point. Just gotta keep my finger crossed and *gently* use those drawers in future.
July 2025
Over time, these pull out pantry shelves got harder and harder to both pull out, and to push in. So grabbed some spray Lithium lubricant and sprayed the rails where I could reach without removing the shelves. Two or three times over the years. Well, the Lithium drys out and gets sticky. I didn’t realize that at the time.
Anyway, it got so bad, I was fighting them every time I opened or closed them and even another dose of spray (Silicone lubricant this time) only freed up one of them. I’d finally reached the end of my patience and although the outer one was working fine at this point mainly from the squirts of Silicone spray I’d put on the rails, I needed to pull the inner shelf for some work. And that took quite a bit of tugging (after emptying the shelves) to get the drawer off the rails and set out of the way. An examination of the sliders showed the yellowish Lithium had gotten sticky. So I used a penetrating lubricant, PB Penetrating Catalyst and a good wipe to remove it. Then I used PB Blaster Silicone Lubricant spray, with the drawer removed it was easy to get all new lubricant from the front to rear of the sliders. Once they seemed to be working fine without sticking, I put the drawer back on, and it’s much better now except it’s still resistant on the last 6″ of travel in either direction. I have no idea what the problem is as a careful inspection showed that the rails are in good condition and the ball bearings are all in place.
I went ahead and pulled it out again, and really carefully cleaned those rails of the sticky Lithium using WD-40. They didn’t have any damage that I could see on close inspection. The ball bearings were still in place or in the rails the way I’d installed them. I really had to tug hard to get the damn shelf pantry drawer off the rails and set aside to work on just the rails. Felt like something was binding but after I got the shelf out, couldn’t find anything that might have caused any binding. Once the Lithium was removed, and Silicone added, they are smooth operating.
Reinstalled the shelf and its performing much better now, I put the goods back on the shelves and I’ll let it go at that. If I have to do it again, I expect it’ll be 3-4 years from now. Might have sold this RV by then.
Thanks for reading!