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Order Blum TipOn & Sync Rods

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Synchronization Rods

The rods come in 112cm lengths and need to be cut up using a hacksaw to make up all the lengths required for each drawer. The best way to work out how many rods you'll need is to use the opticutter website. Enter 112 for stock length and 0.3 for kerf (typical saw blade thickness).

Add the lengths in column G of your table to each row of the tool and it will calculate how many sync rods you'll need to buy. Come back to this tab when you're done.

Actuators

Time to complete the last column of the table that you started filling out. You will need to decide what strength of BLUM TIPON BLUMOTION Actuator is required for each of your drawers. That decision is ultimately based upon the approximate weight of the drawer, the drawer front and its content. The table below show which actuator strength should be used for which drawer weight.

A strong actuator will easily open any drawer with heavy items in it. But, if you use the strongest rated actuator on a small 37cm deep drawer then when you push the drawer closed it will offer quite some resistance to closure and may occasionally bounce back open before it reaches the soft close phase, if you didn't push it closed hard enough. So it's a good thing to try to strike the right balance between opening force and closing force based on drawer weight.

Table 1

If you find it difficult to estimate the weight of drawers and contents for your kitchen then you may find the second table useful. You can look up your Ikea drawer box size, height and drawer front panel combination for each of your kitchen drawers to see the approximate weight of your drawer. You can then subtract this from the weight recommendations for the actuators and this will give you an indication of how much margin you have left for drawer contents.

Table 2

Example: A high 80cm wide, 60cm deep drawer with a 40cm front weighs approximately 12.15kg. Obviously an L1 strength actuator, which tops out at 20kg, is not going to be a good choice. In fact, for a drawer of this size, which would probably hold heavy cast iron pots or china dishes, an L5 is probably the way to go.

If you want quick and dirty assessment of the right strength to choose based on drawer size, just look at the Column A suggestions in the table. In cases where two actuator strengths could conceivably cover the range of weights expected for a particular drawer size, column E tells you at which weight limit you'd switch up to the next strength.

Example: If i have an 60cm wide, 60cm deep low drawer then my choices are either an L1 or L3 strength. Let's say I have a 10cm drawer front on the drawer then I know that the empty drawer weighs approx. 5.1kg and since i'm planning to store mostly dishcloths in this drawer then an L1 would still be happy with 20kg (column E) - 5.1kg (column F) or about 14.9kg of contents. If I think that the combined weight of drawer and contents will exceed column E, then I switch up to an L3 strength device instead.

A couple of final tips:

Never use an L5 on a 37cm deep drawer and always use an L5 on a garbage pullout type drawer.

Unless you have mostly big or small drawers, your average kitchen will use L3's for most drawers, L5's for a couple of the heavy drawers with pots or lots of china and L1's would be used on any small drawers that you may have.

Table 1 (the manufacturers recommendation) defines clear weight cut off points from one strength to the next. But the reality is that there's generous overlap between one strength and the next: An L3 will operate perfectly well at 13kg of weight and an L1 is not going to stop working once it hits the magic 20kg load.
Don't over analyze it. But if you do want to read more then refer to BLUM's own guidance literature here:

So using all this information we can complete the final column in our table for our example kitchen which is shown immediately following Table 2 below.

Table 3

Ordering the Actuators & Sync Rods

In the worked example we needed to order 5 rods, 1x T60L7340, 4x T60L7540, 7x T60L7570 from a BLUM distributor.

For your design you should also now know how many rods to order and whether to order L1, L3 or L5 strength actuators.The table below will help you to translate everything into the correct order numbers for your country and you can also click on the suggested local country distributor icons, which will take you to their website. Then come back to this browser tab when you're done to finish the process. Many companies sell these products so feel free to Google the part numbers if you want to find others.