Anyone repaired a tambour door on a kitchen cabinet

[Roger Mills]

The tambour (roller shutter) door on one of the cabinets in our "new" (2009) kitchen has failed.

The metal faced slats are joined together at the back by plastic strips, which act as hinges. Yesterday, when SWMBO was opening it, the bit she had hold of suddenly became very heavy, and there was an almighty clatter as the rest of it recoiled onto the torsion roller. One of the plastic hinges had failed. When I took it apart, I found quite a few in an about to fail state.

Replacing the shutter - just the shutter, not the whole mechanism - would cost over £200 including carriage. I came across a you-tube video of a bloke showing how to stick a similar one back together using 3m Extreme Sealing tape.

Have any of you ever done anything similar? Was it successful?

[GB]

Clearly, a job for gaffer tape, this one. Sadly, you will have to put the angle grinder to one side.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

How old are they, surely they should last quite a few years in normal use. Plastic hinges, I hate them, My last loo seat failed due to flexing due to its soft close feature. Brian

[Brian]

Webbing strip would be my choice. Fixing is the problem.

You could try glue and staples.

Screws would be best but the heads would add too much bulk I suspect.

If there is a ?skirt? at the sides, could you use two bits of webbing each side and ?weave? the slats between them, with a stitch at each gap to hold things in place?

3m tape is good but I?m not sure about rolling and unrolling it all the time. It copes with a bit of movement but this is more than that.

[John Rumm]

Traditional wood tambour shutters don't necessarily have tape or fabric backings (although some do), they can be held together just by interlocking profiles on the edges of the strips.

I suppose one option would be to make a whole new shutter the traditional way.

(however you would probably need to do them for all the other cabinets to make them match!)

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

on 01/12/2021, Brian supposed :

Is there enough depth for pop rivets, along with webbing?

[GB]

I have a couple of tambour shutters here, on an office cabinet. I've had it nearly 40 years, and it continues to function well.

It's a wooden cabinet, and the tambour is made out of wooden slats. It is lined full width with some sort of cloth backing, glued to the backs of the slats. That's all that holds them together. It's a simple, reliable, and strong fixing.

When I suggested earlier using gaffer tape, I wasn't really joking. Strips of tape glued to the back of the tambour would hold the whole thing together perfectly well. Maybe, some other sort of fabric would be better, and maybe there's a better glue?

[Roger Mills]

Thanks for all the replies - but there seems to be a general assumption that this thing has wooden slats. It doesn't!

The slats are made of thin stainless strips with the long edges turned over such that one is convex and one is concave, so they fit into each other. There's a sheet of thin plastic welded to the back, which holds the slates together and allows them to "hinge". It's these plastic "hinges which have failed. There's no scope for screws or rivets. The side slides are made of flanged stainless "U" channel.

You can see the sort of thing at

[GB]

Does that make any difference, except that you might need different glue to secure the backing material?

[Roger Mills]

It means that the suggestions about rivets and screws - which may be ok for wooden slats - wouldn't work with my unit.

Here's the video I referred to in my first post, showing a similar one being repaired with 3M tape.

Mine is very similar to that, but quite a lot taller. The bloke in the video seemed to be using the same stuff as this:

I was hoping that some of you may have had experience of repairing similar units, and would know what does and doesn't work.

In answer to John Rumm's comment, there's only one such unit in my kitchen, so the tambour door doesn't have to match anything else, as long as it fits in the same cabinet - whose carcase *does* match the others.

[GB]

He is just using gaffer tape, but gaffer tape that's been on steroid for a while. 3M Extreme Sealing Tape 4411N.

[John Rumm]

Yup, I realised yours were metal, hence the comment about making the others match if you did something different for one.

(you could machine on from Ali using normal carbide wood working tools)