I don’t know if growing out your big toe is possible at this age. Have you tried watering it, and planting it firmly in some soil?
A friend of mine got his to grow with an elaborate system of rubber bands.
Some angled steel brackets and a few screws, for strength, or epoxy glue, for looks
Liberal application of wood glue to all mating surfaces. Then clamp in place and let cure.
The cured wood glue will be stronger than the particle board the drawer is made from.
Second the wood glue. It’s stronger than wood
It’ll be ugly as all getout from the inside, but this is probably the only thing you can do aside from replacing the drawer or replacing the backer board.
That said, you should probably fix the primary reason this broke. That much force means:
- the drawer guides may also need work or it will happen again.
- the items in the drawer which may have jammed it shut should get reorganized to keep it from happening again.
- the temper may need some work if this was purely a result of unloading frustration on furniture. This fix may not cost a significant amount, but a bad temper can generate drastically more financial (and sometimes criminal) damage than moderate self control. I know this one well.
Or kids who have trouble remembering that kitchen cabinets and drawers are actually not indoor climbing walls
Regardless of what you do to fix the drawer, consider that its the weight of what you’ve got in the drawer that caused the failure. Consider either reinforcing the underside, and or waxing or lubing whatever the roller or mounting hardware is. The heavy weight causing drag is ultimately why this failed (along with it just being cheap as shit particle board).
When I’ve had this issue in the past, I’ve gone ahead and replaced and reinforced the whole thing with 1/4th inch plywood. You can run two dados up the face board and then run the plywood into those, then pin nail and glue.
Well, we had the bright idea of attaching 3m hooks to the inside of the drawer upside down, and hanging grocery bags from the outside to act as trash bags to swipe vegetable peels off the countertop (if that makes any sense). Coincidentally, we’ve decided not to do that anymore.
I mean thats what did this, without a doubt.
However, at this point, you need to reinforce the guts. Gluing and pinning are not going to be enough.
I suspect that what caused the failure is a lack of soft close. When closing a drawer, if the slide is smooth and doesn’t have a stop, then the drawer front gets a huge impulse when it collides with the cabinet body. Since the entire kitchen likely has the same craptastic quality, the first step is to instruct everyone to close the drawers as gently as possible. Then consider retrofitting soft close mechanisms to the drawers. And maybe even start saving up to replace the cabinets because more failures are likely.
soft close would hurt but when mine failed, it was the weight of the crap warping the structure of the drawer that stressed the joins ultimately leading to failure. Effectively bowing it out from the inside.
You’d be better off replacing that particle board piece stuck to the face with a real piece of wood, and securing that to the drawer with long screws, then screwing the gray face plate to the new drawer front.
This is my recommendation also. Honestly a cedar fence picket cut to size wouldn’t be difficult and would only cost $5 assuming you have a circular saw.
